Many many years ago, I celebrated something for which I was later to regret with total shame.
My “crews” and I celebrated the “good’’ news then, that Ghana was the fourth beer consuming nation on earth. That was something phenomenal. We were excited, energised and, indeed, motivated to celebrate. Boy oh boy, let’s go and booze.
Great to be young
And we did that in a spectacular way. Some of my “crews” were so soaked that they had to be carted away. Isn’t it great to be young? It sure is.
Later in the years, when I became older, wiser, more patriotic and nationalistic, I regretted that foolish undiscriminating celebration. If, as a small Third World country, you are acclaimed as the fourth beer boozing nation, you should be ashamed, not elated.
These days when I listen to radio, and watch television advertisements, some of them verbally obscene or even pornographic, relating to alcohol, I cringe in disgust.
See and hear our young men and women, some of them just big boys and girls, vigorously proclaiming the sexual potency of the booze! And you begin to wonder where the collapsed (collapassed) moral fibre of the nation is pushing us to.
Boozing craze, long distance sex drive
Particular of this boozing craze, is the competing numbers and brands of bitters flooding our market, plus the aggressive indecent manner in which they are afflicting our consciousness. As if presently our survival as a nation depends upon the booze. That is clearly immoral.
Add to this the various medications, pills, tablets, capsules and potions extolling sexual powers. Compound this with adverts showing-casing wives and maidens, persuading their husbands and spouse’s to go for certain brands of sexual stuff so they can perform with fantastic energy in the long distance sex drive. The adverts predominate. There seems to be no sensitivity, no decency, no inhibition, no circumspection, just the crude call for sexual excellence! Where does all that take us to? Moral corruption in moral decay.
Check this, I attended a wedding party and I was shocked at what I saw. Anticipating that the couple, a wise and decent duo, were not going to serve alcohol, the young women, barely out of their teens, brought their own stiff booze in their beautiful all-purse hold-all bags. And they boozed with dubious distinction actually dancing in the provocative pornographic way. It was not difficult to see that many would become the victims, partners, and bonuses for the excited young men hovering around to snatch them away for the night. Disgusting of course. It is one sure sign of our collapsed moral society. No doubt about this. But can it also be the toothache of our super-liberalised sorry economy where anybody can bring in anything to sell, and anybody can produce anything?
This is one thing I am very sure of. Whatever we require to sustain us as a people, booze is not a factor at all. Excellence in the production of the booze can never be a productive life-supporting enterprise at all. And surely potency in sex escapades should be the very least of our productive objectives.
Kitchens of other nations
I should state my take. It is massive food and food-related productivity. There is no historical evidence on planet earth that nations which cannot feed themselves have progressed. I have not found it anywhere that nations whose stomachs lie in the kitchens of other nations have made satisfactory progress. So food, not booze, should be our priority as a developing country. And of course not sex.
Increasingly, the evidence that, as a people, we are not getting our priorities right in the right places continues to slap us on both cheeks. It is a big national headache. Added to this is our ridiculous taste for foreign stuff and our artificial lifestyles. And also our negative attitudes to the things that we should do to secure the economic health of our nation.
I am not an economist. My late mother, a trader, was. She acquired that economic wisdom at the market. Her eye was constantly on the ground, surveying, analysing and evaluating the continuing economic play-out of people’s faces, peoples temperament, peoples pockets and of course price fixing.
I have never been a fan of the philosophy of laissez-faire in an imperfect econometrics of developing countries. Because that can be suicidal.
I believe, very firmly, in the strategic pragmatic controls, to secure the holistic interests of the nation.
