Dagga Party's Eben Jansen has a vision for Mzansi's future — and it's green

Cannabis helped Jansen deal with his own anxiety, and is now, he says, a resource that could help pull SA back from the brink of socioeconomic ruination

27 February 2022 - 00:01 By Sean Christie
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now
Former SABC TV news anchor, journalist, and dagga commercial farmer Eben Jansen.
Former SABC TV news anchor, journalist, and dagga commercial farmer Eben Jansen.
Image: Esa Alexander and Siphu Gqwetha

Eben Jansen suggested the place — Sensiva Café, a “420 friendly” private club on Cape Town’s Main Road. I found him in the hydroponics equipment shop below, joking loudly with two other men. “Black Paul and White Paul” was how he introduced them, adding, “Don’t worry about it, they call themselves that.”

Like many, I recognise Jansen from his years as anchor for e.tv and, later, SABC. At 49 he still has TV looks, a bit of salt in his manicured beard.

The café is shut so Black Paul suggested Superette up the road.  The Pauls made up Jansen’s campaign team: White Paul — Paul Deyzel — is the principal supplier of accommodation to Cape Town’s modelling industry, and a friend from Jansen’s school days. Black Paul is communications wizard Paul Leisegang, who spent a decade as the Motsepe Foundation’s head of marketing.

The talk in the car centred on TikTok. “A video we posted of Eben out at the farm had been blowing up, 40,000 views and counting,” said Leisegang, who explained that their social media campaign targeted a young, hip demographic. “Yes, exactly the people who don’t vote, but nobody else is speaking to them, let alone resonating.”

In the video, Jansen addresses the camera in an industrial greenhouse full of cannabis plants.  His message: cannabis creates jobs, let’s unleash the potential of Green Gold!

The video vanished before we reached our destination: “Removed For violating Our Community Guidelines, illegal activities and regulated goods.” It wasn’t long before the video was reposted without audio, the words “Vote Eben Jansen For Mayor” written in green over the ban notice. “That’s why I’m in this fight,” Jansen said.

A werewolf crawled out of my chest and leapt into the fire

“The unfounded stigma around cannabis is keeping us from unlocking its potential. SA, which has the potential to outcompete almost any other nation due to its growing conditions and low input costs, is dithering while countries such as Uruguay and Argentina are getting aligned and starting to export.”

Jansen had been at a san pedro (cactus) ceremony on a farm in the Western Cape two weeks ago when “I experienced a vision”, he said. “Specifically, a werewolf crawled out of my chest and leapt into the fire. I thought, ‘yes, it’s time to unleash your beast and make a real contribution’.”

He’s unguarded when describing his life. “I was born to a European mother and a South African father, an atypical Coloured family in the sense that it was the time of apartheid yet my father owned land, and I grew up among the farming aristocracy of Stellenbosch.”

From an early age he was the family’s outlier, “the one who ran after the impossible dreams, Mr Wild Goose Chase.” He studied journalism at Peninsula Technikon in the early ’90s — “part of what was referred to as the ‘first intake of non-white journalists’,”  and within 10 years of graduating he was among SA’s most recognisable broadcasters, and being headhunted by big international media outlets.

He opted to stay in Cape Town where, among other things, he partied up a storm. “I was the original old schoolboy in the nightclubs. We used to dance till seven in the morning, and then go to (Club) 55 in Greenpoint and carry on.” Jansen pushed the limits at work, too. In 2002, e.tv dismissed him for impugning Sir Alex Ferguson on air. History repeated itself in 2015, when the SABC fired Jansen after a disastrous interview with the EFFs Mbuyiseni Ndlozi.

“I’ve had some train wrecks in my life, and I’ve had some amazing successes. Underlying it all has been a lot of darkness. The same darkness that was in my father and grandfather I feel in me, and I was always very fearful of it,” said Jansen.

Medicated since adolescence, Jansen “converted” to CBD oils in his 30s “to deal with the anxiety of being always in the public eye”. After leaving broadcast media for good in 2018, “burned out in the extreme”, it was in cannabis that he rediscovered a sense of mission.

Commercial farms are growing medicinal cannabis for the export market.
Commercial farms are growing medicinal cannabis for the export market.
Image: 123RF/Eric Limon

“I’ve been building farms, commercial farms that grow medicinal cannabis for the export market. I work with some of the biggest growers and exporters in a value chain that’s been created over the last few years,” he said.

In Kimberley, “living in a small room off a road with man-sized potholes”, Jansen said he became convinced of the redemptive power of cannabis. “I’m talking about a plant that has the power to heal us as individuals and uplift communities. I’m talking about a spiritual process with a hard-ass economic backend,” he said.

The economic potential he refers to is unpacked in a policy statement posted on Jansen’s campaign website. “Cape Town Cannabis Business Plan” puts cannabis forward as a resource that could help to pull the country back from the brink of socioeconomic ruination. The document proposes the establishment of a “Municipal Cannabis Homeland” spanning Cape Town, Knysna, Plettenberg Bay and Oudtshoorn, which would “determine its own cannabis policies … and also determine its own public health response to Covid, and promote economic and legislative autonomy for these areas to the maximum extent possible”.

Jansen adds some detail. “We envisage cannabis co-operatives at the ward level in which all role players participate equitably. There’s a co-operative model in the wine industry that already exists from feudal times, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, we can do this in a flash.”

Jansen sees himself as a unifier in the emerging cannabis sector. “There are role players spanning commercial farmers, small-scale farmers, activists and various traditional authorities, and they haven’t seen eye to eye but I’m taking responsibility in that space. I’ve engaged these people over two years, and I’m bringing them to the table. Hopefully the officials will join us and we can chart a path forward.”

In the week that followed, Jansen appeared in a live debate on the SABC and Lester Kiewiet interviewed him for e.tv. On TikTok, amid a stream of popular cannabis videos, he said he had a plan for homelessness, sitting in the Mouille Point tent of a street-based person called Valentia. He handed out free buds on the Sea Point promenade.

I saw Jansen one more time on the eve of the elections, at a “gathering of cannabis champions” hosted at an obscure diner in Woodstock. He was noticeably downcast, rinsed out, possibly sensing that the Dagga Party would fare poorly the following weekend, netting only 822 of the 913,031 votes cast for parties.

Nevertheless, we haven’t seen the last of Eben Jansen.


subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now