Did it have to take Uhuru for us to act?

My heart sank when I saw images in the Press of youth wasted away by the alcohol pandemic.

I feel for the families whose children come home each night inebriated, staggering and not knowing the left from the right hand. Many of us would love to see our children to come home sober after a hard day building the nation. Thousands, perhaps millions, of distraught parents have lost hope in their children.

And so it is easy to understand why President Uhuru Kenyatta harangued MPs from Central and Nairobi who visited him at State House on Wednesday. Being a parent, I am sure he knows what it means to see your blood waste away in the gutter.

It is admirable to see that common touch, the panache in President Uhuru Kenyatta. Very few have the capacity to step back like he does and "be human"; getting into the skin of another person and feeling their pain, their joy, if you know what I mean. Alcoholism is a national calamity, not just a Central Kenya affair; future generations are being decimated by killer alcohol brews. The whiffs of the killer brew have been spreading rapidly across the country.

I travel a lot and as my Editor Kipkoech Tanui put it in his column on Friday, there is a new phenomenon in most trading centres located along the road in the country; speed bumps. This, I came to learn (from Mr Tanui) is a desperate measure to protect the drunks staggering home or from one den to another from being hit by vehicles.

I have always wondered why these features have become so ubiquitous when you travel out of Nairobi. Even the materials from which the bumps are made speaks of the helplessness and the haste to save a life. It is a measure nonetheless, which speaks about the failure by those in high office to protect the people.

You feel sad when an MP acknowledges the presence of a factory he suspects manufactures illicit alcohol in his constituency. Did it have to take the President for him to say that? Why was he elected in the first place?

Was it not for the common good of the people? You only begin to comprehend the weight of the issue when you are confronted by the grim statistics showing that a whole generation is wasting away. Picture this; seven out of 10 youth are hold up in a drinking den every day like in some counties in Central Kenya. A whole generation is under the grip of alcohol.

And what is more, with the potency of the illicit alcohol hitting the very essence of human preservation, it might mean that a whole community faces extinction not from war or disease, but from the scourge of alcohol. We, politicians, are often accused of seeing people as voting machines. On this one, I stand to be corrected, we are cooked unless something is done sooner rather than later.

Whereas I admire the zeal exhibited across the country since the presidential creed was given, I feel that little will come out of it unless the strategy changes significantly. First, alcoholism is a habit. One chooses to do it out of will.

Secondly, drinking illicit liquor feeds off poverty and greed. Yet it is foolhardy to imagine that under the current circumstances, it is possible that President Uhuru Kenyatta will pull a magic wand, get everyone off the poverty pit and voila, illicit liquor is off the shelves. Try as he might, unless those he has given a job to protect the citizens do their work, that won't work.

As a lay economist, I would rather see it as a perversion of the economics credo of supply and demand. Because sanctioned traditional brew is still readily available in the villages, if all the consumers of illicit alcohol needed was a drink to while away time. But that is not the motivation for the drinking epidemic we are witnessing now. To say it is caused purely by poverty is to stretch it a little too thin. Poverty plays a role, yes. But the elephant in the room is greed; the urge to make a quick shilling.

Imagine for a moment that the President didn't give the edict to MPs to deal with the illicit brews in their areas or that Ferdinand Waititu aka Baba Yao didn't unleash a gang of youths on hapless alcohol traders in his Kabete constituency. What would have happened? The litres of alcohol poured for the cameras in various places would have ended up in people's digestion systems and put them on their way to an early grave.

Ask yourself, is it that the leaders were unaware of the presence of the drinks? Don't they notice the illegality of putting up speed bumps on roads in their areas of jurisdiction? The paraphernalia tossed out of the makeshift dens seemed to have seen better days. And that betrays them. In my opinion, this was a case of knee-jerk reaction. For far too long, the leaders have looked the other way. Someone is sleeping on the job and that perhaps explains that for once, the President asked the Legislature to take the matters into their own hands.

Ironically, the Executive arm which Mr Kenyatta leads has access to intelligence and seems to be out of wits. What happened?