Date Published: 12/16/09

NIGERIAN POLITICIANS AND ALCOHOLIC RODENTS By Emmanuel Onwubiko  

For three weeks now, Nigerians have confronted the hard and unfortunate fact that the President, Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’adua checked into a foreign hospital in Saudi Arabia to seek for medical treatments for his medical challenge which has now officially been identified as heart-related illness.  

If the question is only that the President proceeded on medical vacation and handed over his presidential powers in the interim to his vice President so that strategic issues involved with daily administration of the executive Arm of government that there will be no vacuum in the governance structure of this country, then we have no much problems with the President’s absence for a whole three weeks. But the issue is that the President allegedly accepted an unconstitutional and divisive advise from his Presidential Advisor on National Assembly matters by not transmitting a notice to the National Assembly’s senate President and speaker informing them that he has a medical emergency to attend to and in compliance with the extant constitutional provision in section 145 of the 1999 constitution he had decided that his vice President should act as the President for him pending his return.  

The decision by the President not to hand over properly to his vice before proceeding on the medical vacation on the advise allegedly of his adviser on National Assembly matters is responsible for the many controversies that continue to trail the president’s medical condition and his absence from his duty post so much so that many citizens have openly called for his resignation on the ground of ill-health. I don’t intend to dabble into the merits or demerits of the opinion raised by some political leaders that the president should stand down on the ground of ill-health. Our concern today is the attitudes of Nigerian politicians (including the alleged bad advise of the Presidential adviser on National Assembly) that Portray them as “alcoholic Rodents” who are out to satisfy their selfish interests to the detriment of Nigeria and Nigerians in general who are at the receiving end of the massive bad governance, greed, corruption and Sponsorship of violent crimes by politicians unleashed on all of us.              

The concept of alcoholic Rodents is largely attributed to the research work carried out by John Crabbe, an American behavior geneticist at the Oregon Health and Science University and the Portland VA Medical center, renowned for his studies of alcoholic Rodents. Crabbe has for years done research on mice from a strain called C57BL/6J, who are unique in their voracious appetite for alcohol. Before proceeding, let me say here that majority of Nigerian politicians especially those in the corridors of power are the same with these alcoholic Rodents because of their propensity and voracious appetite for corruption, greed and electoral violence which are synonymous with animals like the alcohol Rodent controlled by some external forces.  

Are these bad behaviors of Nigerian politicians psychological or genetical?  

Is it in the gene of Nigerian politicians that they should conduct themselves in public offices like the alcoholic Rodents who because of drunkenness will inevitably unleash devastating destruction on any unfortunate house-hold that they may criminally sneak in searching for what to steal? We will return to this question but first let us read the book by Daniel Goleman titled ‘Social intelligence’ and subtitled “the revolutionary new science of human relationship”, so as to comprehend John Crabbe’s concept of ‘alcoholic rodents’ and to link it up with the behaviors of Nigerian politicians. Goleman even told us in his book that the study of alcoholic rodents holds the promise of clues to the causes and one hopes, cures for alcoholism in humans.  

Goleman wrote thus;

“This strain of alcohol-loving mice is one of a hundred or so that are useful for medical research, such as a susceptibility to diabetes or heart disease. Each mouse in a given inbred strain is, in effect, a clone of every other such mouse; they share their genes like identical twins. One virtue of these strains for scientific researcher is their stability; a mouse of a given strain tested in various labs around the world should react like every other such mouse. But this very assumption of stability as questioned by Crabbe, in a now famous, simple experiment”  

“We asked just how stable is ‘stable,’ “Crabbe told me when I called. “We did the identical tests in three different laboratories, trying to make every aspect of their environment identical, from the brand of mouse feed they ate-Purina-and their age, to their shipping history. We had them tested at the same hour on the same day with identical apparatus.”  

So at the identical point-April 20, 1998, between 8:30 and 9:00am local time-all the mice from eight different inbred strains, including C57BL/6J, were tested. One test simply offered them a choice of drinking regular water or an alcohol solution. True to form, the liquor-lovers chose the rodent martini far more often than did other mouse stains.  

Next was a standard test for mouse anxiety. A mouse is placed at the crossroads of two runways, elevated three feet off the ground. Two arms of the crossroads have walls while the other two are open, which can be scary. Anxious mice cower next to the walls, while more adventurous ones explore the open runaways.  

To the great surprise of those who believe that genes alone determine behavior, however, within a given strain some decided differences on the anxiety test were found from lab to lab. For example, one strain, BALB/cByJ, was very anxious in Portland but quite adventurous in Albany.  

As Crabbe noted, “If genes were all, you’d expect to find no differences whatever.” What could have caused the differences? Certain variables were beyond control from lab to lab, like the humidity and the water the mice drank-and perhaps most important, the people who handled them. One research assistant, for example, was allergic to mice and wore a respirator while holding them.  

From John Crabbe’s research findings as reported by Goleman, it is safe to conclude that the alcoholic rodent-like behaviors of Nigerian politicians are not in-born, genetic or psychological, but were encouraged by the docility of the civil society and the weak law enforcement and judicial institutions that should have served as effective remedial checks to these excesses of corruption and greed associated with a majority of Nigeria’s public office holders.  

Nigerians must work for the building of strong institutions to check the evil trend of corruption among our alcoholic rodent-like politicians.