Kwekwe squad’s war on Mungiki drove Kikuyu men to alcohol – Mututho
Former Nacada chairman John Mututho now claims the war on the proscribed Mungiki sect is responsible for the widespread alcohol problem in Central Kenya.
Mututho says the dreaded Kwekwe squad, a crack police unit set up to fight the murderous gang, picked on sober young men and accused them of being members of Mungiki.
“Why you see so many Kikuyu young men coming to drink, it is because there was this Mungiki problem and anybody who was not drunk was said to be Mungiki. So people had to find a way of intoxicating themselves to escape the wrath of the Kwekwe squad,” claimed Mututho in an interview with Citizen TV.
“So you find a lot of young men were forced into this habit because of bad security decision taken by somebody. That as we are fighting Mungiki the key indicator should be sniffing tobacco and anybody who is not drunk. And that is where we went wrong. By volume, Central takes less alcohol than Western, but the death rate may be 100 times higher in Central than in Western.”
LOVE FOR MONEY
The crack unit was set up in the first term of President Mwai Kibaki when many macabre killings in Nairobi and Central Kenya were blamed on Mungiki.
However, Murang’a Woman Representative Sabina Chege differed with Mututho, instead blaming the alcohol problem in Central Kenyan on unscrupulous businessmen who are out to make money.
“The kind of alcohol being taken in Central is poisonous. People in Western might take more but they actually consume a lot of their traditional brew. Initially, when it was about muratina, the people preparing it were cautious because they were also consuming it. I’d not go through the Mungiki way but I’d go through the love for money for the businessmen,” she argued.
“Initially, there was the plastic bottle that was there before then businessmen would inject it with poisonous stuff. So that when somebody takes it, you just get high and drop. Most of them would even die. But this is love for money. People from our region loved money so much to an extent of not thinking about their brothers. And these were their young brothers. Now what is happening is that their children are now consuming what they were giving to the poor people.”