South Africans drink‚ get behind the wheel and cause thousands of deaths and injuries a year‚ said the BBC. The World Health Organisation (WHO) said the country tops the list of the continent’s biggest boozers.
Now Africa Check‚ an organisation that sorts out fact from fiction‚ confirmed that this is true.
The BBC report did not mention the number of people who are ill or die from alcohol-related illnesses. Nor did it report on deaths‚ injuries and sexual violence associated with alcohol intake.
About 58% of deaths on South Africa's roads are alcohol-related‚ a higher proportion than any other country that supplies this data‚ according to the WHO.
The BBC said South Africa “has the highest level of alcohol consumption in Africa per capita‚ nearly double the continent’s average”. The reporter‚ Pumza Fihlani‚ got this information from the WHO’s 2014 report on alcohol and health for the period 2008 to 2010.
The WHO’s figures are based on a three-year average of recorded alcohol consumption from production‚ import/export and sales statistics and on unrecorded intake using Food and Agriculture Organisation statistics and various modelling techniques.
Alcohol intake South Africa: 11.0 litres Gabon: 10.9 litres Namibia: 10.8 litres Nigeria: 10:1 litres Rwanda: 9.8 litres Uganda: 9.8 litres Burundi: 9.3 litres Sierra Leone: 8.7 litres Botswana: 8.4 litres Cameroon: 8.4 litres Source: WHO. The litres of pure alcohol are derived from the alcohol content of the drinks - for example‚ a 5.5 percent alcohol content means you’ll take in 41.25ml of pure alcohol in 750ml.
The graph shows that South Africans older than 15 drank the equivalent of 11 litres of pure alcohol a year. The continent’s average is 4.66 litres.
On average‚ South Africans consume between 10 and 12.4 litres of pure alcohol a person a year‚ according to local figures.
This is between 500 and 620 glasses of wine or between 1 000 and 1 240 shots of spirit a person annually.
Africa Check noted the health implications of excessive drinking: “Given that South Africa‚ Namibia and Botswana feature among the heaviest drinkers‚ it is no surprise that Southern African has the highest number of people dying of disease caused by alcohol intake in the African region.”
consumption in litres of pure alcohol and includes people aged 15 years or older.
This incorporates both regulated alcohol sales and “alcohol that is not taxed and is outside the usual system of governmental control”.
According to the WHO data, the world’s per capita alcohol consumption is 6.13 litres per year. The WHO Africa region’s per capita alcohol consumption is only 0.02 litres higher at 6.15 litres a year.
This is lower than Europe and the Americas, which consume 12.18 litres and 8.67 litres respectively. The regions that consume the least alcohol are Southeast Asia (2.2 litres) and the Eastern Mediterranean (0.65 litres).
Significantly, the WHO excludes seven African countries with large Muslim populations – Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Djibouti, Morocco, Somalia and Sudan – from the “Africa region” and categorises them as “Eastern Mediterranean”. In most of them, alcohol sales are either restricted or banned.
While the WHO regional averages provide a unique guide to alcohol consumption rates, they provide little insight into the extremely varied drinking patterns of individual countries which are the focus of more detailed country profiles. The data is also several years old due to the time taken to collate it. Furthermore, the accuracy of WHO data, as we have shown in previous Africa Check reports, is not beyond question.
Kenya, Time claims, is a country that is “consuming ever more alcohol”. South Africa is described as “one of the world’s heaviest drinking nations” despite the fact that the WHO ranks South Africa in 55th place out of 189 countries. (Kenya lies at 118th. The heaviest drinking nation, according to the 2011 report, is Moldova followed by the Czech Republic).
The article includes a quote from a Nairobi social worker. “Do we drink because we’re Kenyan or are we Kenyan because we drink? That is the question,” he asks. But the article fails to ask how much Kenyans and South Africans drink.
Between 2003 and 2005, according to the 2011 WHO report, Kenya’s adult per capita alcohol consumption was 4.1 litres a year. In 2003, data showed that 74.4% of Kenyans were lifetime abstainers and 85.4% had not consumed alcohol in the last 12 months. A 2012 rapid situation assessment of the status of drug and substance abuse in Kenya found that 86.4% of the population reported that they did not consume alcohol.
Between 2003 and 2005 South Africa’s adult per capita alcohol consumption was 9.5 litres a year, according to the WHO report. Data from 2004 revealed that 65.2% of South Africans were lifetime abstainers and 72.9% had not consumed alcohol in the last 12 months.
A similar abstention rate of 72.3% was found in a 2011 study published in the African Journal of Psychiatry. The study used data from the 2008 South African National HIV, Incidence, Behaviour and Communication survey.\
The remaining 53 African states vary greatly in their consumption rates, according to the WHO.
Countries that have large Muslim populations tend to have low per capita alcohol consumption rates. Examples of these include Mali (1 litre per person per year on average), Comoros (0.4 litres), Guinea (0.8), Libya (0.11 litres), Egypt (0.37 litres), Mauritania (0.1 litres), Somalia (0.5 litres) and Algeria (1 litre). An article that looked at two of these countries and concluded that “Africans are teetotalers” would suffer from the same flaws as the Time article.
Higher up the spectrum you’ll find the Democratic Republic of the Congo (4.2 litres), Angola (5.4 litres) and Tanzania (6.8 litres). Uganda (11.9 litres) and Nigeria (12.3 litres) have Africa’s highest consumption rates. However, Nigeria’s consumption rate is only 0.01 litres higher than the WHO European region’s average consumption rate.
The WHO defines heavy episodic drinking as consuming at least 60 grams or more of pure alcohol on at least one occasion in the last week. Standard drink measures vary from country to country, but in South Africa a standard drink contains 12 grams of pure alcohol. Therefore, consuming five-and-a-half glasses of wine (at a typical 12% alcohol volume) or five 340ml beers (at a typical 5% alcohol volume) at least once a week would be considered “heavy episodic drinking”.
The WHO Africa region has the highest prevalence of heavy episodic drinking. According to the WHO data, just over 25% of drinkers in the African countries it includes in the region can be classed as “heavy episodic drinkers”. However, the WHO does not have information on the prevalence of such drinking in twenty African countries.
While the Time article reports that 25.1% of drinkers in the WHO Africa region drink too much, it fails to mention that the majority of people on the continent don’t drink at all, according to the WHO data.
The WHO estimated that in 2004, 57.3% of the “Africa region” were lifetime abstainers and 70.8% reported not consuming alcohol in a year. By comparison, only 18.9% of Europeans and 17.7% of the United States population were lifetime abstainers.
So yes‚ South Africans booze a lot – often with horrible consequences. But if you civilized and you know your boundries - you know when to stop.
