By now, Abati should know that if one
does not wish to be ever carpeted, the solution is to aspire to
nothingness. One should never do two things: Never, ever write and do
not be President. Insults –public and private — roll with such
undertakings. The earlier one shrugs it off with the classic
speck-on-my-shoulder pose, and faces the job one is assigned by the
public to do, the better for everyone.
Abati’s response was too much Turenchi;
enough to make one wonder if there was no truth to the report in the
first place. The Yoruba say when an elder repeatedly states, “it does
not matter,” it means there is a matter somewhere.
The matter of Jonathan’s tippling habit
did not start via reports of a “Jonathan-hating” media. I have
interacted with associates that have also interacted with Jonathan at
close range and they say, indeed, he has a blooming relationship with a
certain brand of wine. The point, however, must be made that what
constitutes overdrinking, is to an extent, subjective, especially when
ethnic stereotyping impacts the manner we sum certain predilections
executed by people who have been marked with such a behaviour.
Stereotypes are part of every cultural
fabric that we cannot easily do away with. This makes determined habits
take on a higher resonance when carried out by a member of a group we
associate with particular labels. For instance, an Akwa Ibom/Cross River
woman has to contend with the clichéd musings of indomitable coital
dexterity in a way a Yoruba woman would not. An average Igbo man bears
the burden of an image of an inordinate capitalist, driven to accumulate
material wealth by any means necessary. The Yoruba is considered slick
while the northerner (all grouped into the “Aboki” trope) is an oaf, a
terrorist or a sick mind that covets prepubescent girls.
Please note, stereotypes are not always
devoid of reality but the problem is that they turn into self-fulfilling
prophecies. They lock a people into defined cultural traits without
considering individual divergences. Anyone who does not conform to
stereotypes is not seen for their humanity but as acting out of type.
In the case of Jonathan, a man from the
Niger Delta, he is easily tagged a tippler because that is part of the
stereotype of folk from riverine homelands. But do they actually drink
more than the rest of Nigeria? We can ask breweries to give us
consumption data but that will not go far enough. The issue is not so
much about how they drink but what they are said to drink. Moonshines —
a.k.a. Ogogoro, Sapele Water, Wuru — is the stimulant associated
with them. The crudeness of this local brew — with its high ethanol
concentration — is superimposed on Niger Deltans to give a distorted
picture of a crude classless people who not only lack the refinement of
high culture but are, also, on a self-destruct mission.
At the outset of Jonathan’s Presidency,
his opponent evoked this ethnic slurring when they called him the “son
of a drunken fisherman.”
The question, for me, is if Jonathan’s
“Red Wine” weakness –if he truly has one — is a problem. One side of it
is that it is a character flaw that reminds us that even presidents are
human. Boris Yeltsin was a notorious drunk yet, as a president, the sum
total of his presidency cannot be summed-up as failed. A little
off-centre on the intoxication prism is the 35th president of Brazil,
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula left office with the highest rating of
any political leader, ever.
Before Abati picks up his pen — again, he
should be glad that it is not a charge of mental illness that was
levelled against his principal. Both the 16th and 35th presidents of the
United States of America, Abraham Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
who were famously celebrated last week, had bouts of manic depression.
Same obtained for the United Kingdom’s war time prime minister, Winston
Churchill.
If Jonathan has a drinking problem, he
would not be the first – or last — president in the world to battle the
bottle. Aso Rock’s huff-and-puff is uncalled for because it only fuels
the open-ended rumour. It’s one of those stories –like Sani Abacha’s
death by Indian prostitutes or, Umaru Yar’Adua’s failed kidneys — that
no official rebuttal can ever displace.
The flip side of any president’s drinking
problem is that it would affect his handling of state issues. Yeltsin,
when inebriated to his eyeballs, was a one-man comedy troupe. Come to
think of it, a man who primes his own body to self-destruct could
eventually put the country on auto-destruct in a fit of bacchanal orgy.
It would have been a whole different story if Jonathan’s administration
is not as rudderless as it appears now. That is the part of the tippling
tales that concerns me.
If he has a drinking problem, then, we
need to know how it affects his judgment on national issues. Is his
indecisiveness on the question of corruption, for instance, a problem of
an ethanol-addled mind? When he said he was not going to mention the
names of those who are corrupt because he does not want to be attacked,
was it him talking or it was a bottle’d inspiration? Besides, if we
separated the drink from the man, are we going to have a better person
and a leader? In other words, can alcoholism actually be blamed for the
Jonathan administration’s shortcomings? And if abstinence won’t make him
a more effective leader, why are we even talking about it at all?
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