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Kenyan Journalist Oliver Mathenge has opened up about battling alcohol addiction.
In an interview, Mathenge revealed that alcohol had taken over his life to the extent of spending up to Sh80,000 a night on the bottle.
In the interview, he explained how at one time how alcohol addiction made him consider quitting his job and even committing suicide. All this he explained was in a bid to escape from his problems.
“If I am stressed, the first thing that would come to my head is alcohol…I graduated from beers to whiskeys. I could take a bottle of whisky alone,” he said.
“I had turned alcohol into my painkiller. It was a solution to all my struggles,” he added.
In earlier interviews Mathenge revealed how he could hardly survive a day without taking alcohol, save for few instances he woke up with untold hangovers.
“In between the day in the office, I would go out to have a few shots of whatever drink I thought my system needed. Some Fridays, drinking would start as early as the midday and would sometime go on until Sunday (Yes, I would spend two days in bars like that’s all about life). I was a slave,” he said.
But it was not without a cost, he says his love for the bottle broke up families and threw him into debts.
“I was breaking down. I messed up family and social relationships. I was messing up my job (until God decided I needed greater responsibilities to keep me in check). I suffered uncountable meltdowns. I sunk into debt (deep as in deep to hundreds of thousands) as I sought to finance a champagne life on beer money,” he said.
