SEE THIS: If President Jonathan Has A Drinking Problem

The Presidency is not going to confirm whether President Goodluck
Jonathan is a tippler or not; this is never going to happen. What is
sure is this: the President’s aides will shrilly deny that their boss
takes more than a glass of red wine, now and then.
This week, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity,
Dr. Reuben Abati, launched a visceral attack against purveyors of
Jonathan’s alleged habit. It was his second strike. The first time,
Abati practically swore that all the intoxicants in Aso Rock were “Red
Wine”. This instance, in response to a media report that posited that
Jonathan’s recent ill-health in London was the end-stage of a binge
indulged in during his 56th birthday bash, Abati fired off an
unnecessary diatribe, even threatening legal action.
By now, Reuben 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?

BY ABIMBOLA ADELAKUN
Source: Punch