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Tobacco pin-pointed as big marital spoiler
2008-07-27 13:54:10
By Wilson Kaigarula
Revelations that smoking is a source of marital problems besides the commonly known medical one of causing cancerous diseases, shocked the audience at a function focused on the effects of tobacco, which was held in Dar es Salaam on Friday.
The audience comprised mostly members of the Tanzania Tobacco Control Forum (TTCF), who assembled at the Karimjee Hall for the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the NGO, which is on the forefront in the battle to curb the growth and use of a crop that destabilises health, kills, drains lots of funds, slows down human welfare and destroys the environment.
The TTCF Executive Secretary, Lutgard Kagaruki, said research conducted in Namtumbo, Ruvuma Region - a major tobacco cultivation area - showed that loss of sexual potency by men was one of the ugly by-products, which often led to divorces.
Nearly 75 per cent of peasants there smoke raw tobacco and have respiratory diseases; and some 1,500 out-of-school children in the 8-17 age bracket labour on tobacco farms.
On a happy note, however, she told the audience that steadily, many cultivators, who were not prospering but driven into destitution instead due to low prices and debt bondage through being loaned inputs like fertiliser, were abandoning the crop in favour of environmentally friendly and economically beneficial crops like sunflower and simsim.
Kagaruki further shocked the audience with findings of a study in which she was a participant - that Tanzania spends an average of 30b/- a year on the attempted cure of cancer patients, some of whose ailments are induced by tobacco use.
In the environmental sphere, tobacco cultivation precipitates destruction of nearly 400,000 hectares of natural forest each year, and over the same period, 50,000 tons of wood are used for curing tobacco.
Some AGM delegates came from Zanzibar and Pemba, who spoke bitterly about the high incidence of smoking on the Isles, where in some extreme cases, it was more cherished than listening to taarab music, the most decent and respected pastime.
They lamented the fact that some people chewed tobacco in its raw form rather than smoked its processed, cigarette version, and amongst them were youngsters who ``graduated`` to drug use after deeming cigarettes being too weak to give them sufficient emotional satisfaction.
A senior Zanzibar State Radio producer, Fatma Said Ali, said she would team up with colleagues in the broader electronic media to campaign against tobacco use - a campaign that would be given a bigger push by tough anti-tobacco legislation being crafted by the Zanzibar government and scheduled for tabling in the House of Representatives before the end of the year.
Yet another tonic is endorsement by the AGM, for TTCF to open a Chapter in the Isles, to be headed by Ali Othman, a member of the Forum`s Executive Committee.
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