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                   Local Gin Distillers Criticize Nigeria Ban

   by Hilary Uguru, Chris Stein

   A batch of local gin killed about 70 people in southern Nigeria earlier
   this month, prompting a nationwide ban on drinking the beverage.
   Producers and imbibers of the popular drink say the ban threatens not
   just a beverage, but a lifestyle.

   It's called ogogoro, and Nigerians were sipping it decades before the
   mass-produced lagers commonly found in Nigeria's bars came on the
   scene.

   Ogogoro is made from palm sap, often in a backwoods distillery far from
   the eyes of the government bodies that are supposed to regulate the
   brew. But after about 70 died from drinking ogogoro earlier this month
   in the southern Rivers State, and another 20 died in April in Ondo
   State in the southwest, Nigeria's food and drugs regulator banned the
   consumption of ogogoro.

   That has rankled Rosaline Iseviaka, who said she uses the beverage not
   to get drunk, but as a way of healing.

   "If I have sickness now, should you believe, and I do not have money to
   go to hospital, and they give me native medicine and I am supposed to
   use ogogoro, should I wait for federal government to come and give me
   help so that I cure myself? I cannot wait, no," said Iseviaka.

   At a distillery in the creek-side village of Okwagbe in the southern
   Delta State, Samuel Egedegbe was carrying on a family tradition of
   distilling ogogoro, until the recent ban.

   He said he only uses materials approved by the food and drug
   authorities to make his gin. He blamed distillers who added methanol to
   their mix to increase its potency for the recent deaths.

   "I prefer that the federal government should look into this thing
   because real ogogoro does not kill, does not affect anybody. But this,
   that and other they use to distill ogogoro, we do not understand it,"
   said Egedegbe.

   Egedegbe learned the business from his parents, and now is the chairman
   of a major distillers union in Delta State. He said if the government
   does not lift the ban, he is effectively out of work.

   "If we leave it, what will we do? Can the federal government assist us
   with money to help us to finance another business? If they can do, then
   we can find a way to stop it. But this is our own. We are brought up on
   it, and our children are brought up on it. So therefore how can, it is
   impossible to stop," he said.

   Egedegbe stands behind his product. The 67-year-old said he drinks some
   every morning, for his health.
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   [1]http://www.voanews.com/content/local-gin-distillers-criticize-nigeri
   a-ban/2827776.html

References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/local-gin-distillers-criticize-nigeria-ban/2827776.html