There’s a new danger for the city dweller in Nairobi, and it is drinking beer. Alcohol has such a bad name these days that even Barack Obama is weighing in — he recently said smoking marijuana is safer than drinking alcohol. Just imagine!
Alcohol-hate is new to Kenya, largely because we are a people that has always been comfortable imbibing. Every tribe in the country has its own traditional brew, and sagacious old men and women have from ancient times gathered in one or other hut in the village to swig calabashes full of good, invigorating pombe (beer), the better to crown a long day spent tilling the fields or tending livestock.
Word has it that even in northern Kenya — where religion made alcohol taboo — locals still got their share. They simply ferment camel’s milk, resulting in a potent brew that would lead to more than a few shukas getting a little loose.
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This colourful history is now coming to an end. While Africans in general and Kenyans in particular have no issues keeping their pombe down, it has become fashionable to blame alcohol for everything.
Kenya’s National Authority for the Campaign Against Alcohol and Drug Abuse — the mouthful name of a state organ abbreviated, thankfully, to Nacada — has taken its alcohol hatred to entirely new levels.
Nacada wants Kenyans to stop drinking, period. They reckon that every ill in Kenyan society must be due to alcohol. And that effectively making it impossible to drink would magically solve all our problems.
Too many road accidents, perhaps, to them, are caused by alcohol. Solution? Ban the damn drink! Really? Drunk drivers must be causing the accidents.
What to do? Bring out the alco-blow contraptions, lay ambush outside bars and other drinking establishments at night, and haul in drivers who have had more than one beer that whole day.
Problem is — we now have more road accidents than we did before. We are losing more Kenyans to grisly road carnage than when we were all drink-happy. Solution: ban night travel. Not a bad move in itself. But surely, an admission that it wasn’t the alcohol causing the accidents in the first place is in order.
We have gone further. The new fad in town is that being drunk leads to HIV infection. Nacada has hopped onto some Western bandwagon that claims being drunk leads to casual, unprotected sex — and hence HIV infection.
Mind you, this same report also claims that being drunk reduces sex drive and makes men incapable of performing in bed. Indeed, Kenyans have long known that the latter is true: every couple of months, irate women in Nyeri or Kiambu will beat up and chase their drunken husbands away from matrimonial beds in a stunningly coordinated demonstration of conjugal indignation.
The reason: the men drink daily and are unable to fulfil their conjugal obligations when they get home. How, then, can this same drink that makes men impotent and unable to have sex, be responsible for increasing HIV infections? Only Nacada knows.
In fact, the tough new laws are simply driving bars out of business. Drinkers are now buying alcohol from the shops and imbibing at home.
The result: unemployment for barmaids, who are now turning to prostitution to make ends meet. The effect of that will be increased HIV infection rates. Don’t blame the alcohol!
