News reaches us from London that, whereas 20 years ago they drank on average five-and-a-half units a week, women are now tossing back nearly eight units, with a rising number -- about 20% -- consuming more than the recommended maximum of 14 units a week.

Here at the Mahogany Ridge, it strikes us rather moderate. A unit of alcohol, after all, is best measured as something that can be held in one hand -- a six-pack, let's say, or a bottle of brandy.

But in Britain, where nothing ever happens, such statistics are regularly doled out to alarm and somehow scare people into believing they drink way too much and their lifestyles are unhealthy.

Again, the truth of the matter is that it's perfectly acceptable to drink until you fall asleep. That, as far as we're concerned, is the "correct" amount. More than that is probably wasteful.

I mention this because, amid the barrage of reports from the ruling party's policy conference in Midrand, one item has stood out above all else, and that is that the President has revealed to journalists that he suffers from insomnia as a result of "seeing extreme poverty", as one newspaper put it.

The initial, perhaps instinctive reaction to this was not a wholly sympathetic one.

Our great dancing leader has, after all, certainly gone to great lengths to remove extreme poverty from his gaze, even turning his rural KwaZulu-Natal homestead into a R64-million citadel to keep the riff-raff at a suitable distance.

And, as if that wasn't enough, he's now in the process of getting a new R2-billion 300-seater aircraft which would greatly increase that distance.

According to a report in The Star, defence secretary Sam Makhudu Guluybe has been in the United States finalising the purchase of a Boeing 777-200LR for Zuma, and a smaller and, at R235-million, much cheaper aircraft, a Global Express 600, for the deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe.

The Boeing, incidentally, comes with a $150-million price tag -- that's about R1.26-billion in taxpayer tom -- but it's going to cost an extra $80-million or some R675-million to reconfigure the aircraft.

"Reconfigure", as anyone who's ever had the misfortune of flying long-haul in economy class can tell you, is aviation-speak for stuffing the cabin with as many extra seats as possible.

It seems the president's family is possibly even larger than previously imagined.

Still, that's a lot of money to pimp a Boeing into a flying mini-bus with leopard print finishes, and one really does suspect that the salesmen in Seattle do have a good month whenever African leaders step into the showroom.

But back to the point. The president really should try drinking. It may or may not help with the insomnia but, with a good few under the belt, the extreme poverty at least becomes less of a pressing issue than getting, for example, the waitress's telephone number.

In truth, and that's another side-effect of a good few under the belt, the president may even come to realise that it wasn't the extreme poverty that was giving him sleepless nights, but rather the realisation that, to put it bluntly, the big chief thing was coming apart at a fair clip and it was ugly and scary.

To be fair, Zuma seems aware that something is amiss. He has a vague sense that all is not well out there, not only in the backwaters and the frontier provinces, where they keep the winter chill at bay by burning school textbooks, but also a lot closer to home.

As he told delegates in Midrand, ". . .the ANC should be able to cleanse itself of alien tendencies which range from wanton ill-discipline to those linked to incumbency. These tendencies include social distance, patronage, careerism, corruption and abuse of power; ineffective management of the interface between the movement and the state; a flawed approach to membership recruitment and a decline in ideological depth amongst cadres."

I'm not the first in pointing this out, but that precisely is a description of his own shortcomings, and those of the grubby hacks he has appointed to his inner circle.

But he has no idea how to fix things. His performance at Midrand has been described as a cocktail of blind optimism, theoretical bankruptcy, limited vision and rambling denialism, It was woeful. And he doesn't realise he is the problem. As Business Day's political editor, Sam Mkokoleli, pointed out, "He appears not comprehend how his lack of knowledge or ideas is the reason policy discourse grinds so slowly in the party and his government."

Oh dear. I would drink if I were the president. A lot.

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus. Andrew Donaldson can be followed on Twitter here.

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