Where it all goes…

So nope, I don’t know where N600b plus beer goes among Nigeria’s 160m males and females. Wherever it does go, though, I’m sure it is quite at home.

Once again, dear reader, we are going to gleefully leave behind us, for a while at least, all the depressing talk about this country’s politics and problems. Have you noticed that these two seem to go hand-in-hand? Anyway, once again, we are going to kick off our shoes, hoist our cups of beer and trip the light fantastic. At least, you are, and I will join you by hoisting my cup of waterlou. If you have been keeping faith with this column, you will understand why I take waterlou. I certainly am not going to regale you with that tale.

Please don’t get me wrong. The stories you will read here are not meant to denigrate beer drinkers or promote beer drinking in any way. I have been trying rather to answer the question, ‘what’s in a beer’ for the past three years. I bet you thought you had heard the last of it. Not by a long shot, until we get to why the breweries are posting insanely, obscenely, huge profits each year when nearly every Nigerian you meet is a church-or-mosque-going religionist, and dirt poor to boot. Each one swears by their individual book that their religion forbids the imbibing of alcohol. Yet these things have systematically disappeared, each year. Where then does it all go, and what effect does it have? Let’s tackle the effect first then, perhaps, it may lead us to the trail.

Recently, I saw a post which showed a car on the roof of a house. There it was, shiny red and all, and sitting right pat in the middle of that rusty space more than fifteen feet above the ground. Naturally, it begged the question, ‘how did it get there?’ No one quite knows if this is one of those postings they call ‘Photo trick’ or ‘Photoshop’ or the product of a fevered brain. My own weak brain just told me, this car is sitting on the roof where reason says it should not be.

Again, I drive, but only barely. I have long admired those who can do close parking in tiny spaces, and park as close to the sidewalk as possible. I admire, I say, because I just cannot execute this marvel. The only thing I can just about manage is to park the car so that the front engine gets out of the way of traffic, but not the back; it refuses to align and insists on jutting out into the traffic, waiting for any willing motorist to thwack its behind!

I tell you, when I see vehicles parked on narrow ramps in car shows, I am green with envy. I always wonder which genius did the parking. For that reason, I never attempt to drive my car on the mechanic’s pit in garages. I am always afraid that we would have to leave off the matters of the car’s repairs and start looking for the mechanic beneath it. Honestly, my car ineptitude leaves me gasping for food.

For a long time, I went around holding my head in shame until someone let me into a little secret – and that is that no normal person can achieve those enviable parking feats without a little bit of help from your good old beer or even something a little more stringent. Why that never occurred to me before, I don’t know, but now I think of it, it makes sense. It can only take a beer-addled brain to perform such high-end, needle-precision, neck-breaking, insanely-crazy, moronically clever stunts. Never mind that they may also be geniuses. So, obviously, a genius I am not.

Honestly, I could appreciate that little hint. I remember me a little story I read a while back. I’m sure I have told you before, but I don’t mind telling you again. It’s always my pleasure to repeat my stories. You’re welcome. Anyway, there was this man so full of beer he thought he could do anything; and he took himself up a tree and climbed that tree in exhilaration till he reached its top at all of its sixty-something feet where he promptly fell asleep. When he woke up next morning, though, he knew he needed another dose of the enabling juice. There was just one problem: he found himself unable to come down. It took the intervention of the fire services to bring him down. I think he fit the moronic end of the description.

I read somewhere that ‘beer is made by men, wine by Gods’. This is credited to, guess who, Martin Luther. He however was bringing out the reason why men should be wary of its rather potent side-effects for man cannot be trusted. For one thing, it can make one to scale heights or ramps one would not ordinarily attempt. For another, anything made by man is liable to cause an exaggeration of inherent abilities while denigrating inherent inhibitions and values.

Let’s see what we mean. A man regularly visited a bar every day and ordered three beers, all of which he drank from three different chairs. When the bar man asked him why, he said well, where he was coming from, he regularly met with his brothers for beer in the evening. Since moving into that town alone, he thought he should keep the tradition alive. The different chairs he sat on represented each brother. One day, he came in and asked for only two beers. Had one brother died, the barman wondered? No, said the man; he had given up drinking beer, he said. So, the ones he ordered were for his brothers who had not given it up yet.

Now that we have disposed of its effects, let us trace where it goes. First, since I am not a drinker, I cannot speak from a first person point of view position. If we had public houses in this part of the world, I could conduct a research by counting how many such each local government hosts. Rather, what we have are popularly called bars which operate, let’s see, informally in the evenings when many weak eyes have closed in temporary sleep. So, there is no way to ascertain its patrons.

Nevertheless, we can hazard that tonnes of the stuff disappear into the throats of the faceless ones who wait for my vigilant eyes to first drop off in sleep before sneaking around and into those bars. The beautiful rats. Anyway, since the breweries invented canned beer, the story has become very complicated. It is not possible to track drinkers by only the cars parked outside the bars any more. After all, you can’t go around inspecting everyone’s shopping bag. So nope, I don’t know where N600b beer goes among Nigeria’s 160m males and females. Wherever it does go, though, I’m sure it is quite at home.

What more can we say about the character of beer when you have people going around saying things like, ‘I’ve got 99 problems and beer solves ‘em all’ (Earl Dibbles Jr); while Plato said, ‘he was a wise man who invented beer’. Frank Sinatra was also said to have said, ‘I feel sorry for people who don’t drink (beer). When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson added that man needs beer to wash off the stains of care.

We are not celebrating beer today. It’s not up to me to do that. We are merely trying to answer the age-old question of where it all goes. When next the breweries post their after tax profit, perhaps I should just grit my teeth, grasp the edge of the chair to avoid falling over, and end with what Homer Simpson said about beer: ‘… Now, there’s a temporary solution’.