{UAH} Addressing the national paradox of alcoholism
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5:30 AM |
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It is unfortunate that the proposed bill has already cultivated bad blood between 'School Teacher' Nambooze and 'Class Monitor' Moses Kasibante. These two legislators are amiable. However, disagreement should not translate into hate mongering.
I find such feuds unnecessary because public issues must be debated in public realms, and not personalized. Unfortunately, the unpolished egos of our politicians make the distinction between public and private very grey. Any challenge to their causes ends up brewing a storm in a 'class' of mwenge.
However, that aside, there is merit in paying keen attention to Nambooze's proposition, that should actually become a bipartisan affair for MPs from all aisles of the House.
A caveat should be placed here, that if there are MPs who feel that the proposed bill, in its current form, may infringe on particular interests of their electorates, then they should move a motion to amend, not to kill the bill.
While debating the perils of this matter, one should ask the fundamental question: is alcoholism a national problem?
I spent a number of months in rural Uganda, working on some projects in 2014 and this year. My experiences attest to Nambooze's concern: alcoholism is a national problem. I believe that many would agree that this is actually a national catastrophe.
How then can we address it? Even before we do that, what are the causes and social structures that transmit and sustain it?
It is quite easy to enumerate the effect of alcoholism. After all, the tradition in Uganda is always to jump onto the signs and symptoms, or to mitigate effects, rather than locate triggers and turn them off from the source.
Ugandans have resorted to excessive alcoholism to the point that we are already in the Guinness book of records. It is not that consumption of alcohol is bad per se.
However, if it incapacitates the workforce, rips families apart and affects the mental health of a large chunk of our population, then we must address the matter with some dedication. There is need to assess the economic cost of this vice to the nation.
Would regulating the hours of sale make a difference? Would a combination of taxation, regulations and penalties reduce the vice?
There are many questions because these are social and behavioural matters that are complex and inextricably intertwined within our cultures and politics.
First, it is important to view alcohol consumption in the context of substance use. Many youths in Uganda consume alcohol and marijuana simultaneously. Some even snort petrol to get 'high'.
These behaviours are signals of culpability to more profound street drug misuse – cocaine, methadone, etc.
Second, the chain effect of all these leads to various risky behaviours such as unprotected sex, rape, suicide, crime, and violence. The one that must concern the nation the most is the decay in manpower and the redundancy of the nearly 80 per cent youthful population.
If every able-bodied person in Uganda gets inebriated by 9am, and remains vegetated for the rest of the day, when do they partake in economic production?
Alcoholism also erodes our values. Uganda is a highly-Christian society where the sanctity of family and the fear of God rest heavily in people's hearts.
Alcohol has ripped families apart and made some people impotent and sterile. The attendant violence has a negative impact on women, children and the elderly. The Nambooze bill, therefore, requires the exercise of probity.
Lastly, and most importantly, these negative or, rather, suicidal mannerisms should be carefully traced to the role and nature of our governance.
The government runs an economy that creates losers and winners in absolute terms. The winners are those who feed off the muscles and benevolence of the state as active agents in economic production. The losers are those who have fallen through the crux of the liberalized markets.
The politics of repression then kick them hard into a narrower economic space. The social space dynamics shared by such wretcheds of the liberal economy tend to cause them to reproduce themselves. Those ensnared in such have limited options, mostly risk-prone and those, to them, are the means and an end to life.
viamordst_26@yahoo.ca
The author is a Ugandan social and political analyst based in Canada.
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