There are as many boozers in Kenya as there are beer bottles. They comprise a significant demographic from the city, through the slum, to the countryside. They are loyal soldiers who owe allegiance to the bottle in the first and country in the distant second. It’s easy to see why; booze makes them happy. Kenya makes them, well, Kenyans. Nothing more. Alcohol is to them what blood is to vampires. It is the stuff of life, the aqua vitae. And you know how uncannily capable a vampire gets after imbibing a pint of blood. Once on a high, the alkie can do anything- drive, drink more, fly a car, woo the queen and expertly analyze.
Until Joe Mututho says that they can’t. In fact, Joe thinks that a boozer is a good-for-nothing hopeless failure that can’t do anything. ‘It’ can’t keep a home, can’t drive, let alone walk home. Can’t even work a woman, or say no to a man if it’s the fair sex.
Just who (or what) exactly is Mututho? There’s a miscellany of definitions, especially from the boozers’ quarters. To me, Mututho as the square-toed, bald-headed teetotal who thinks alcohol is the antichrist. He’s the boozer’s bane. He hates booze more than he loves his wife, and has made it his life’s mission to rid the nation of the drink, just as the nation strives to rid its children of polio.
Save for his hate of the drink, very little is known about this man, which leaves us to the devices of speculation. Why does he hate booze so much? What happened, Joe? Were you abused by a drunken girlfriend? Were you abducted by alcohol dependent aliens and tortured? We can never know for sure. But there must be an underlying factor, because he is drunk with the conviction that booze must be outlawed. Who knows, maybe he spends his afternoons on weekends expending hard earned taxpayer (booze tax) money at a gun range, doing target practice with beer bottles for targets. Or scouting e-bay for the latest model of the alco-blow.
Meanwhile, all us boozers spend weekends a little more prudently. When we are not at work driving the economy, we are at our local driving the economy, happily paying up taxes to finance the hefty salaries demanded by the thugs in parliament. Occasionally, they show up at our local and thank us for our fervent efforts. “Kila mutu apewe mbiri mbiri.”
Regardless of all of Joe’s erudite activism against booze, he forgets that he would be jobless, were it not for all the boozers, who endure dark, draggled nights, meager wagers and venomous spouses. We pay your salary Joe, we finance your afternoons at the gun range. The least you can do is pay us a little respect for our valour, not have us rounded up like dogs and mortified on national TV. I bet you break the law every day, every weekend, but you do it confidently because fierce-looking, bribe-hungry cops aren’t lying in wait. It’s called freedom. I want it too