Deaths from killer drinks are symptoms of deeper problems

By Barrack Muluka

I don’t know which is worse – Kenya’s drunken decadence or the State’s knee-jerk response. However, both are mind-boggling.  They could easily goad and coax you towards an indifferent scornfulness. 

Some 70 adults killed within 24 hours. They voluntarily administered upon themselves a lethal intoxicant. Many more are wallowing and writhing in pain, in battered hospital beds. Some have gone permanently blind. It is simply pathetic and disgusting.

Some families have lost several people in the ruinous self-driven binge of inebriety. The disaster is suffocating other families in a heavy blanket of deja vu. They have seen it before. It happened before, six years ago. They lost a father here, a mother there, a daughter, a son – it is nothing new. The graves are there for everybody to see. So, too, are those who went blind in the previous orgy.

Yet this free-willed ingestion of poison by adults did not stop. Some remorseful individuals are saying they will now switch to less malignant intoxicants. No more drinking of this lethal material, they say.

Senior officials from the very caring Government of Kenya are very angry. They are asking what their juniors were doing when these adults were freely introducing killer substances into their bodies. Where was the chief? What of his assistants? Where were the police officers? How could they allow whole slum-villages to wallow in the waters of death?

And so these senior Government people are breathing fire and brimstone. A chief has been interdicted here, another one there. John Mututho of the national anti-narcotics and drugs authority is livid.  The Minister for Interior, Mr Lenku, is equally livid. They have been moving from pillar to post and post to pillar telling just about anybody who will listen that people will go to jail. Which people? Not the ones who administered poison upon themselves, but the ones who sold it to them and those who did not know that some fellows were getting drunk on poison. For a start, 52 Government officials have been sent home.

Such is the tragedy of a nation in the grip of clueless leaders who address symptoms when they should be getting to the heart of the matter. When you see an angry Mr Lenku on TV, you would think that someone laced an infant’s milk with carcinogens. That he sweetened it with honey and filled the baby’s drinking bottle with the concoction. Thereafter, he got the baby to imbibe herself to a poisoned death. Why are we not asking the right questions? What drives mature men and women to voluntarily roll in lethal drinks, knowing very well they are lethal? Who are these people? What are the common defining factors?

The one thing you could not fail to notice from the TV footage was the victims’ tumble-down environment. These drowsy, poison slurping individuals live in subhuman conditions. They exist in the extremes of poverty and social exclusion, on the fringes of society. Put simply, a majority of these people have nothing to live for, or even die for.

Let me tell you the harsh truth. These people gave up on life ages ago. They actually died long, long ago. They are the waking dead – zombies. That is why they labour to pay for lethal drinks, knowing very well that these drinks could lead to instant death.

The question we should be asking is; what has driven people to such extremes? Simple – they live on the extremes of social exclusion. Harsh anti-alcohol laws and reducing “official drinking hours” will not do.

At what hour of the day or night is the impact of poison any different? Sociologists have taught us that when people are socially excluded from acceptable human standards of living, they regard themselves as all-round outsiders. They are outsiders to your laws. Your regulations mean nothing to them, beyond irritating them. When you make harsh laws against the taking of alcohol, what they understand is that you have outlawed them further.

However, they will take you in their stride. They will consciously stay outside your “lawful universe” and devise ways to outwit you. In any event, you are meddling with their  universe. At no point do they consider that they belong together with you and your so-called laws and regulations.

The Government, on its part, seems to accept this state of huge swathes of the population being social and legal outsiders. These slum dwellers and their rickety homes are embarrassments that those who govern can quietly live with, provided they don’t draw attention to themselves.

Your chief is then the chief of alcohol-drenched slum dwellers. The MP, the county commissioner, the governor and the President – all know about the hopelessness of these roles. The holier-than-thou leaders in the Opposition know about them, too. Religious leaders tell them about the kingdom of God and the world to come, even as they accept Sunday offerings from them.

These people only matter at election time and when significant numbers have swallowed the drink of death. When the drink takes effect, it jolts the power-wielding class into shock. Some hitherto obscure county commissioner gains momentary fame, interdicting some hapless village chief. Two or three shebeen queens are arrested and locked away. Soon the story will fade away. Indeed, it may even be quickly forgotten altogether if Boko Haram sells their East African franchise to Al-Shabaab and Shabaab strikes again. We will run with Shabaab and forget about this wretched lot of the earth, to remember them again when significant numbers die next.

Alcohol and alcoholism is never the problem. They are only symptoms. These alcoholics are running away from something. You can sack people and interdict others until kingdom come, illicit killer brews are not about to go away. If the need for these drinks exists, someone will still brew them. Another one will sell them. Others will drink them to death. Sacking people as Mr Lenku says he has done will not solve the problem. Mr Mututho has said that these dismissals “will solve this problem forever”. They will not.

A State that rescues citizens from the extremes of social exclusion is the only viable answer. Can we trust the current political class – in Government and the Opposition alike – to map the way out of Kenya’s debilitating social exclusion? Can the religious community for once embrace a liberating theology and move away from preaching about tithes and calling for Mpesa?

The writer is a publishing editor, special consultant and advisor on public relations and media relations