Kirinyaga youth have made alcohol a 24/7 affair

If consumption of alcohol was business, some of my friends would be billionaires now. Forty percent of my friends and close acquaintances have become slaves of the bottle. I don’t know what’s in those bottles nowadays. I’m a teetotaler, I can’t tell. But, believe you me something somewhere has gone wrong.

It started off a just as a joke for most of them, one bottle with friends, and two for the road and the third one is now drinking their senses out.

Gone are the days when beer depots and pubs used to be forty kilometers away. Then, men would walk and comeback crawling at dusk when the ‘two for the road’ took toll. They drank from their hard earned sweat. Those days, the likes of my grandmother, who was a leading teacher of the booze and onetime traditional brewer, would treat us to all manners of theatrical presentations as they came from their drinking sprees every evening. Their comics revolved around singing, wailing, cursing their haters and non-existence beings, staggering and falling in ditches. From the ditches, they would head straight to bed dirty as they were. The following morning, they would wake up sober and head on to their daily chores as if nothing happened last evening.

Fast forward; today is a totally different story…a story in which most of my friends are intertwined and have therefore become the main characters. ’Drinking,’ especially in my rural county of Kirinyaga has become a 24/7 affair.

In my village, young men drink anything that comes in a ‘bottle of beer or spirit.’

This generation of the sons of the soil spends their days and nights in pubs drowning themselves in substandard concoctions in the name of liquor. They don’t work; they don’t eat and can hardly afford to buy themselves a round of beer.

Many have made alcohol their breakfast, lunch, starter soups and buffet dinners. I don’t know who to blame, but I think the blame entirely lies with them, and squarely on you and I.

You as the pub owner have made it your business to operate a pub in every village and have branches in every corner so that they no longer need to walk far to find one.

They, the drinkers, patrons and teachers of the booze, have ensured alcohol never runs short of demand even when your supply is more.

I on the other hand, I’m their ‘savior.’ Whenever they call from pubs, I pick and drive them to their homes at wee hours of the morning. Besides that, I pay some of their beer bills and buy them one whenever they request. I do it out of love but it’s not doing us good now.

Perhaps we all need to come back to our senses and realize that alcohol consumption is running out of hand in our society. Research has in the past shown Alcohol to be the only drug which can cause sudden death to the user in relation to its effects. Personally, I have witnessed the horrors of living with an alcoholic. Alcoholism is a disease and as a society, tackling alcohol addiction should go beyond talking about it and regulating alcohol consumption hours as it is currently with the Mututho Law.