By Obi Nwakanma

Every time I see the publisher and Chairman of the Vanguard, Mr. Sam Amuka, he reminds me of what I’d like to be when I grow up. Spare and study, Uncle Sam seems built to defy time and the vagaries of aging. I have tried to find out the secret. Once at the flats, he said, “well, it’s the advantage of people like me built small.” It might well indeed be. My younger brother, Buddy, an Attorney in Owerri is also built small. I had joked with him last Christmas, that one day, people might say I’m his dad, when they look at him, and see me besides him. Small is good. Great things come in small measures. Like the Beetle, they are built to last. But there is something else to it. I have observed that Uncle Sam, at his age, swims at least ten laps most evenings. He has made it routine.

The aerobic value of daily swimming is unquantifiable. It brings down the flabs. He is also a man who no doubt loves the Epicurean rites – the joy of the open table. Yet his eating is disciplined. There is no excess. Simple, healthy fare, taken in accountable measure. The gathering of friends around the common table to share the communion of bread and the deep reassuring restorative of wine in itself is one of the healthiest and most beneficial of all rites. Yet, the secret is, while we take pleasure in food, we must do so sparingly and in small measures. That is an important lesson that many to us Nigerians have yet to learn.

Nigerians are wont to eat huge mounds of food and large quantities of “assorted meat” – fried, oily, and maggi-cubed. And we succumb to the increasing degeneracy that comes from over-indulgence and the sedentary life. This issue is one that I’d like to use this column today to address, just as a way of piggying back to the finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s laments two weeks ago, published in the Vanguard, of the ravages of High blood Pressure in her ministry. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala used the event of the opening of a clinic and a crèche in her ministry to lament that she as well as the Minister of state for the economy, Mr. Bashir Yuguda, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry, Mrs. Anastasia Daniel-Nwaobia, and 70% of the staff of the ministry have all come down with High B-P. It is a dangerous count for what has been described by physicians as the “silent killer.” If her intention was to draw from the deep well of Nigerian sympathy, by showing how hard they have been working to save the economy, and how the work and their worries have combined to drive their blood pressure sky-high, the minister may have failed.

Of course, Nigerians expect them to work hard. No one says that the business of managing the economy of a nation like Nigeria is easy. But what Dr. Okonjo-Iweala may just have done inadvertently is to expose a damning fact: a bunch of sick hypertensives are managing the Nigerian economy. That is dangerous. But I do relate. Three years ago, during my annual check, I was diagnosed with dangerous levels of high blood pressure. I had no inkling but for my required, annual routine check.

I had actually taken my mother to my family physician for her own check, when my doctor decided to take routine measure of my blood pressure, and was startled by the result. “As a black man,” he said very seriously, “you cannot walk around with blood pressure this elevated!” It turns out that black people are uniquely predisposed to high blood pressure and its spin-off illness, diabetes, according to contemporary medical science. He quickly put me on a routine of drugs to bring it down by reducing that pounding of blood that takes its toll on the heart, weakens its arterial network, and pumps floods of blood to the brain and other vital organs of the body, with the hardening of the arteries from plasma sedimentation that could cause a plaque that makes cardiac function increasingly difficult over the years.

There are of course many side effects to uncontrolled high blood pressure, I came to learn, and the more worrying for me is incrementally reduced brain function leading to increasing memory loss and possible links to dementia and Alzheimer’s; the rapid weakening of kidney function as a result also leads to Diabetes. I did read somewhere in the New England Journal of Medicine, that uncontrolled diabetes itself which leads to diabetic retinopathy, gum disease, nerve damage, kidney failure, glaucoma, and in some really terrifying spin-off, liver or hepatic cancer, can very easily be the result of radical, complex physiological and biochemical changes, the result possibly of salt retention. Salt retention in the body leads to increased water retention in the body. This slew of bad spin-offs make High blood pressure very bad news. Many Nigerians  walk around with elevated blood pressure, and because there is very little routine or preventive care in Nigerian medical practice, these people die very suddenly, and we usually blame spirits, witches and wizards, their neighbours, or the devil. Of course, the devil is always in the mix, and in this case, the devil is lifestyle.

Here therefore is where Dr. Okonjo-Iweala’s laments become interesting. She seems to suggest that high blood pressure comes with increased pressure or tension in one’s life or in the work place. I think the picture she paints is slightly inaccurate. It might just be one, nearly indistinct factor. Lifestyle is the key. Working till 1:00 am in the morning is bad practice. It is a clear example of disorganization, because it does suggest that the ministry of Finance and Economic Planning is either understaffed or does not delegate its functions well.

A sleep deprived minister is incapable of thinking clearly. Routine delegation of function to a highly trained staff of bureaucrats in the ministry will ensure that the minister and her top staff do not routinely stay till 1:00 am doing work. In any case, burning the occasional candle brightly into the night is not unexpected: I, myself, am up in my study sometimes past 3:00 in the morning, writing, researching, commenting on Graduate seminar papers or preparing lecture notes. I do not expect public sympathy.

It is all part of the package. Establishing the crèche and the clinic in the ministry is generally not a bad idea in terms of workers benefit. But perhaps the minister might have thought more about a well-funded government program of well-staffed, public, neighborhood clinics and Crèches all over the city to serve other working parents, rather than an exclusive zone of unmandated privilege serving the staff of her ministry exclusively. Perhaps a well-built gym, kept routinely spick and span for her ministry, might be more like it.

A little change in life style. Some years ago, Mr. Ojo Maduekwe advocated routine biking as a healthy alternative to frequent car-use. He was laughed off the stage after a near-miss modelling his own truth. Truth is, Ojo was right and wrong. Right in the solution, but wrong in the sense that he did not pressure his ministerial colleague for Abuja, to first construct and develop Bike trails in Abuja as it is routine in all modern, civilized cities today to prevent accidents. So, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, step out of your chauffeur-driven air conditioned car into the sun for a while and recharge your Vitamin D deficiency; do not eat dinner or anything else after 7:00 pm; take long walks in your neighborhood; get a good night’s sleep; lose some weight; avoid big servings of carbs; beans is the food of the gods, and a glass of real, aged cognac is always good after dinner, and I am a fan; and like Uncle Sam, take a regular dip, darn it! And while we are at, madam, metu kwa ole – get some really good sex: it is the best known prophylactic and armour against that monster.