PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe has thrown his weight behind reforms aimed at curbing growing alcohol abuse, telling youths in Harare that being drunk or high on drugs is the same as being “insane”.
The teetotaller President, known to despise drinkers, famously threw a drunken former Vice President Simon Muzenda out of his house when he found him walking around shirtless.
In a major speech on Sunday, Mugabe said alcohol abuse “retards intellectual growth” and was limiting the ambitions of young people to just being “employees”.
“If you are uneducated in a world of great intellectuals, where ideas and systems have become very intellectual, if you cannot cope with the demands of the world and you cannot adjust to it you become a nobody,” Mugabe said, speaking on the eve of Zimbabwe’s 31st Independence.
“If you become a heap of flesh with no intellect, you become a football for other people, they will use you. Since you are still pursuing your education and you are still growing in mind and body, let nothing interrupt that natural development of mind and body.
“Don’t do anything that disrupts that natural development or ruin it completely, so stay away from those things, drinks and drugs, that ruin you. Don’t drink alcohol it is ruinous, it is addictive.
“If your mind is not healthy, you are as good as an insane person and nothing can be done, that is why I say stay away from drugs they will ruin your mind.”
In his autobiography, A Lifetime of Struggle, Edgar Tekere revealed how during their exile years in Mozambique in the 1970s, coordinating armed resistance to colonial occupation in Zimbabwe, Mugabe demanded Muzenda’s eviction from their shared house.
"Take this man away from my house! He gets drunk, walks half-naked down the corridor, in the presence of my wife,” Tekere remembered Mugabe telling him. Alternative accommodation was found for Muzenda.
Mugabe appointed former health minister Timothy Stamps his health adviser last year, and the first major policy reform has targeted alcohol abuse.
The new alcohol policy proposes to prohibit consumption by pregnant women, teenagers and the visibly inebriated.
If passed into law as an amendment to the country's Liquor Act, the regulations will also bar the mention of alcohol in advertisements aimed at families, sporting promotions and educational materials. The sale of alcohol in any outlet will be limited to the hours of 6AM to 7PM, except on Sunday, when alcohol counters will close at noon.
Economists and legal experts said the proposed policy reform is ill-thought and will be difficult to implement. Some noted that the beer industry is an important component of national economic output.