Tujilijili ban: Bitter lessons learnt

ZNBC reporters call them plastic beer sachets. But tujilijili do not contain beer. Traditional millet beer has an alcohol content of around two percent. German lager made from barley is about four percent whereas the “potable alcohol” in tujilijili – diluted with water and artificial colours and flavours, exceeds 40 percent – they are spirits not beers.

They all claim to be quality products but do genuine wine makers use artificial colours to make wine red? Is real brandy made from distilled molasses? No, rum is the cane spirit, brandy is ‘burnt wine’ not industrial grade bio-fuel made potable by some fiendishly clever chemistry. These people are poisoning the population and they know it.

Unfortunately the history of capitalism is the history of drug dealers. Tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea and alcohol are all drugs responsible for varying degrees of damage to the human body. Just because they are legal does not alter that fact. The Europeans bought many African slaves in exchange for alcohol and used them mainly to produce other drugs: tobacco, cacao and coffee and sugar cane. Coffee, for example, is a naturally bitter stimulant and the sugar is used to make it palatable but sugar cane also yields rum and cane spirit. The capitalist economy owes a lot to these drugs.
The most infamous example of officially permitted drug dealing however is the British Opium Scandal whereby the Chinese were forced at gunboat point to import opium from Britain’s Asian colonies. The wealth generated has since been laundered into American universities and presidential families, Cathay Pacific, Vidal Sassoon and other very clean, very famous global brands but their history is forever stained with the shame and criminality of the opium trade.
This kind of primitive accumulation is so common under capitalism that you have to wonder why Colombian cocaine magnates like the late Mr Escobar were not allowed to turn their ill-gotten gains into clean money in the form of sports clubs or coffee plantations and beef ranches as they were trying to do when they were killed. If the coca leaf grew in the Appalachians or Rocky Mountains they would have legalized cocaine a long time ago. They have legalised medicinal cannabis because it grows in California and even English green houses.

Just because capitalism cannot do without drugs does not mean Zambia should allow tujilijili to destroy our people the way British Opium destroyed a whole generation of Chinese. These petty distilleries have by now made enough money to be able to set up fruit juice plants. Our mangoes, guavas and pineapples are still rotting in the countryside while city people continue to drink fake orange, fake pineapple and fake guava juice. Does that make sense?

Tujilijili must go because the fake ‘potable’ alcohol they contain is poisonous. The ‘portable’ sachets are found in toilets, along bush trails, on buses and even in the possession of children. In African culture alcohol was a sanctioned good. It was consumed by adults and only on special occasions. The only civilization that promotes a daily consumption of alcohol is the capitalist one and throughout the colonial world from Ireland to the Kalahari and Australian deserts and now Zambia millions of victims of the spirits of capitalism tell the tale of dysfunctional families, damaged populations and missing generations, especially of young men. We could if we chose accuse the opium, rum and gin bandits of genocide.

Primitive accumulation is tolerable only for so long. After a while the enslavement of Africans, the export of opium to China and the looting of Mayan temples had to come to an end. The pirates were rewarded with knighthoods and allowed to invest their tainted money in more acceptable businesses like cosmetics and transport.

That is the nature of the game. And so the jili packers must start to launder their ill-gotten fortunes now and try selling fruit juices and sweets instead. They should count themselves lucky that the global libertarians conned our inexperienced MMD leaders into creating an enabling environment for drug pushers posing as foreign direct investors because under different circumstances they could all have been locked up for dealing in illicit spirits.

Let us hope that Zambia has learnt its lesson. Never again must the Government allow harmful drugs to destroy society the way the potable alcohol industry has done. And the ministers who gave tax holidays to chigoloki (sugared water) bottlers – what were they thinking? Did Zambia not make its own Tip-Top? Why then must the country forfeit its tax revenues just to be grateful to investors when they use our water, our sugar and our cheap electricity to set up a bottling plant?

Maybe now would be a good time to give the municipal councils back their beer halls and taverns. We have seen enough of economic liberalization to realize that it can be dangerous. The colonial Durban system of municipal control of beer halls was a major source of council revenues so at least Chibuku sales paid for the refuse collection, library books and flowers in city parks. The Swedish Systembolaget shops made the state the only pusher of spirits and wines but at least it was able to fund many beneficial public projects from the alcohol revenue.

What has the Zambian population gained from private sector driven mass cheap alcohol consumption except death and destruction? We have seen enough to know that even if the World Bank flatters Zambia (and itself) with a Middle Income Country certificate it counts for nothing if people are drinking themselves to death, breathing sulphur dioxide fumes and drowning in plastic refuse while their copper wealth is trucked and shipped to vaults in Switzerland leaving behind big holes in the ground and huge reservoirs of sulphuric acid. We hope that Minister Nkandu Luo’s blow against alcohol poisoning is only the first in the battle to reverse our national humiliation at the hands of latter day opium traders.

The author is a social scientist with over 30 years’ experience in university education in Zambia and abroad.

[Zambian Daily Mail]

 

Article extracted from XtremeZambia website http://www.xtremezambia.net/tujilijili-ban-bitter-lessons-learnt

PUBLISHED – April 24, 2012