Last week, a video surfaced on social media showing the country’s youthful Minister of Health engaging a group of youth whom he had found in what looked like a session of binge drinking. In the trending video, the minister first asks the group of youngsters to consider quitting, but upon resistance from his interlocutors, he urges them to drink less. The video, which seems scripted, then makes the ground for the campaign dubbed ‘Tunywe Less’ whose choice of words suggests that it is mainly targeting the youth. This follows unsettling statistics that were shared by the Ministry of Health recently, showing an increase in alcohol consumption in Rwanda in the past 10 years. The statistics which came out of a countrywide survey, indicated that consumption of alcohol had increased from 41.3 per cent in 2012 to 48.1 per cent, which raises concerns over the growing prevalence of Non Communicable Diseases (NCDs) amongst the population. Needless to say is the fact that the most at-risk group are the youth, which means that if nothing is done to curtail the trend, even national development will be adversely affected because this is the most productive group. The findings show growing consumption of alcohol in rural communities when compared to Kigali and this raises concern due to the proliferation of potent alcoholic beverages in countryside set ups. This calls for more vigilance, especially by the country’s Foods and Drugs Authority (Rwanda FDA) to detect these liquors, which are at times made out of potent concoctions, with disastrous effects. Secondly, there is a need for continued investment in leisure facilities, which will provide an alternative preoccupation for our youth, to ensure they don’t end up indulging in alcoholism because of limited recreational activities. For a country with ambitions like what Rwanda has set out to achieve, anything that could potentially derail us must be detected well ahead of time and a solution found before the damage is too much, or worse still, the situation gets out of hand. Fortunately, the government is being pragmatic. From the survey, the trend is that heavy drinking has reduced in the past 10 years, where findings from the sampled population indicate that this reduced from 23.5 per cent to 15.2 per cent. Also worth mentioning is that a recent study by the World Health Organisation, whose findings were published in May, indicate that Rwanda ranked lowest in the East African Community in ‘pure alcohol’ consumption, where the per capita consumption stood at 1.88 litres per year. Uganda ranked top with their consumption at 12,21 litres consumed per capita, annually.
