But does the reason for fighting alcoholism matter, as long as the war against alcoholism is fought?
And the rich men are not asking those questions because they are members of golf clubs, can afford holidays at the beach and abroad, and when they drink cognacs, whiskies, lagers and wines, they have drivers or cab fare to take them home. With the right support, they even become presidents. The poor, on the other hand, are going to take short cuts to reach the same place - brews with chemicals to make them drunk quicker, and drinking close to home so all they do is just walk home. And they don't have playing fields. Their education is a shell compared to what the rich can afford. There are no rehab centers for them. The sports bodies are shutting out several youth due to corruption and ethnic bigotry.
The alcohol problem is a class problem. And with devolution, this problem will devolve to all counties unless we have a rethinking of our national values, our political consciousness and our commitment to recreational space and rehabilitation facilities for the public. Which ties in to the use of land. The rampant commercialization of every inch of soil in Central Province has led to murder within families, land grabbing, the replacement of food growing with rental concrete structures and now the destruction of the lives of the youth who are squashed on small plots of land with no jobs and nowhere to breathe. When Wangari Maathai said Mother Nature can be unforgiving, we restricted Mother Nature's wrath to drought, famine and deterioration of tourist sites. We haven't recognized that the destruction of our youth, of our nation's future, is part of Mother Nature's indictment against us. And that's the second reason why the conviction behind fighting alcoholism matters - so that other counties avoid the mistakes of Central Province by seeing that alcoholism is a social and environmental malady which only be remedied through respect for Mother Nature, justice for the poor and a comprehensive social re-engineering.