Dorcas Rigathi, Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua’s wife, on Monday said they will support the drug addicts who are on treatment at the Miritini rehabilitation centre.
Dorcas said women are the only people currently getting the treatment using the NHIF card at the rehabilitation centre.
“What we are trying to do is that right now there is NHIF and in Miritini rehab centre, women are being given free service but men are left out and this is what I am saying as a boy child champion, how can we give women and leave out young men,” she said.
“What we intend to do is to see how we will be able to bear the cost of NHIF so that we pay for them a one-year programme to get treated using the cards.”
She said that in the coastal region, use of hard drugs is the biggest problem, hence the government is looking into ways on how they can reach out and speak to the addicts, as well as bring them to the rehab to bring an end to the problem.
Dorcas also said that all recovering addicts will be taken to vocational training colleges and get connected to job opportunities to reduce the level of unemployment.
“Most of the problems that we had before is that people will come to a rehab and once they are done with the treatment, they just go back to their frustrations and to what they used to do and relapse,” she said.
“We have those who can be trained and become professionals in different fields like plumbing, we will also try to connect them to the other new programs especially the affordable housing.”
She said that others can be given tools to help them create jobs for themselves because the recovering addicts have skills in fishing.
The DP's wife said that some drug addicts are people who have been to schools and, therefore, are trying to see how best they can bring them back and validate their dreams.
“What I foresee is that we are going to win the war against drugs, the problem that we had before is that maybe there was no government goodwill but fromPresident William Ruto, his deputy and even now within the administration, everyone is working to see that this drug issue is being addressed comprehensively and conclusively,” she said.
Dorcas said that as a mother she feels it is time to start doing things differently because people cannot be allowed people to sell those drugs and kill a generation.
The boy child champion said that many people who are on the streets are people who went to school and others are young people from universities.
In Miritini rehabilitation centre, she said that like half of the people that she found there are actually university graduates who have not completed their education while others have completed their studies but they got caught up in drug addiction.
She said that drug addiction is a mental health issue and people are sick, therefore, what the government needs to do is to treat and rehabilitate them.
She spoke during her visit at the Miritini rehab centre where she said that she is the boy child champion.
This comes after DP Gachagua announced war against drug use in the Coast region during his last visit to Mombasa in April.
Gachagua said then that the President directed him to hold a meeting in the coastal region with national stakeholders in order to find the way forward, clear mitigations, agree with each other and start working on how to end the drug menace.
According to him, those who are in the business of selling and bringing the drugs in the region are people from the coastal region.
“The people doing this business are not people from Nyeri where I come from, some are our leaders but we are going to deal with them,”the DP said.
“You want to harm another person's child for you to become rich, own wealth, buy luxury houses, posh cars and hide some money in the United States, yet you are harming people's children. A time has come where we must speak the truth because they are known."
