Matatu driver who battled alcohol takes his last ride

Richard Mbugua left, an unidentified work colleague and best friend Evanson Kariuki (right)

KIAMBU: Forty five year old Richard Mbugua, would have made a compelling ambassador for the National Authority for the Campaign against Alcohol and Drug Abuse (Nacada) with a story fit for a feel-good movie.

The logline: A matatu driver, with a reputation for being conscientious, meets the love of his life, becomes a prisoner of alcohol and almost loses his family – twice.

He raises himself up from the abyss, stops drinking completely after watching President Uhuru Kenyatta launch the war on second-generation brews, saves his marriage and his family and returns to the straight and narrow path.

Mbugua’s story would be persuasive if it had the classic Hollywood happily ever after ending. It does not by a long shot.

Just when he had turned his life around, the alumnus of Kanunga High School, died in a horrific crash on the morning of August 16 along Kiambu Road while his wife and three children headed to the Ndumberi Roman Catholic church for early morning mass. He was buried on Thursday August 20.

He was behind the wheel of a matatu that collided with a private vehicle claiming two lives and sending 15 passengers to Kiambu County Hospital.

“The children just absolutely adored their father,” his wife, Susan Nyambura, 39, reveals stoically as she confronts life without the man she loved through the good and bad times.

Susan should know about the bad times. It was she who watched Mbugua battle the demons of alcohol and twice took their children and left him because she could not bear to see how drinking was affecting him.

And twice she returned to the homestead: “I knew I still loved him and had accepted him as he was”.

Their love story began in the most unlikely of places, a matatu ride from the city centre to Kiambu in February of 1996. The two were introduced by a mutual friend.

Their blossoming courtship was however, interrupted when Nyambura accepted a job as a salonist in Kasarani that required her to move and live close to her workplace. For more than one year, Mbugua was reduced to visiting her homestead and inquiring from family and friends how she was doing.

That was until December 24, 1997, a day before Christmas. “He saw me talking to a friend, approached me and said he would never leave me and would not let me return to Kasarani,” she recalls.

The two picked up where they had left off and took the relationship to a new level, living together as a couple. The children came in quick succession; Maureen Njeri in October 1999, Ann Njeri in December 2003 and Peter Mbugua in July of 2006.

Nyambura earned a living working at a local salon while Mbugua worked as a matatu driver on the busy Kiambu 100 route.

All was well until two years ago when Nyambura noticed a change in her husband. He started drinking heavily and moved to consuming second-generation brews. The tell tale signs of alcoholism reared their ugly head from the clinking sound of tiny bottles stuck in his jacket, to always staggering home dead drunk.

She says: “The children still loved him. He always brought his earnings home. It was not that he blew all his money on alcohol.”

But the Mbugua she knew ten years ago had now become a different man. The verbal fights and his obsession with drinking bruised their relationship and twice, May 2013 and June 2014, Nyambura packed her bags and with the children, left for her parents’ home.

“I eventually attended counseling and learned that the best way to help my husband was by listening to him and showing him affection not anger,” she says.

Nyambura remembers Mbugua watching TV as the President made the declaration that illicit brew should be destroyed then watched as it was poured onto the road.

“He was initially in shock and then he told me he was going to stop drinking.”

The pressure to turn his life around also came from another quarter - his childhood friend and former matatu tout who worked with him - Evanson Kariuki Pepe.

 

Despite being a former drinking partner and workmate in the matatu sector, Pepe had turned the corner and became a born again Christian. “I stopped drinking and encourage him to stop.”

Progressively, he watched Mbugua battle with alcohol. “I still remember rushing him and his wife to Kiambu Hospital late one night with his body stiff because of addiction,” Pepe says.

“He could not sit straight, we had to position his body such that his legs stuck out of the car window.”

Mbugua willingness to change came gradually. He asked all the right questions: How would he deal with withdrawal symptoms? Would he need counselling? Eventually he was sold.

Looking back, Pepe, 40, now a ward manager in Kiambu County says he saw Mbugtua transform.

“He offered to discuss his addiction in public, during a Nacada drive in Kiambu, if doing so would encourage other men stop drinking. Unfortunately, on the day he was to speak, he was called to work”.

Nyambura and the children also saw a new Mbugua who came straight home from work and rarely passed by the local pub.

“He would even pass by the butcher and purchase pork for his family,” remembers his elder brother George Ng’ang’a. “I knew he had changed.”

On that fateful Sunday, Mbugua was up by 4am ready to report to work. He gave Nyambura Sh100 for her church contribution and asked her to pray for him.

He stepped into the early morning darkness and was gone.

At exactly 6:28am she received a strange phone call from a work colleague telling her that Mbugua’s matatu had been involved in a crash at Rock City. Could she immediately head to the accident scene?

She got a ride from a friend and hopped into the vehicle with her eldest child Maureen. “When we got the accident scene, I saw the vehicle he had been driving. It was severely damaged but Mbugua was nowhere to be see.”

 

They were eventually advised to head to the hospital where he had been taken.

Pepe had received a similar phone call and he ended up at Kiambu County Hospital where he was unable to trace his best friend among the injured.

When a friend asked him to join them at the mortuary, he knew the worst had happened. The memories of their childhood and friendship came in flashes. He had been the common thread in their relationship with Nyambura.

He bows his head and lets the tears flow. When he is composed, he wipes them away and looks up. Choking, he declares, “I lost a true friend.”

Nyambura is trapped in a state of shock, trying to grasp what it means to be a widow at such a young age and pondering the future of her three children.

Mbugua’s sister Agnes Njeri puts everything into perspective.

“Mbugua had just turned his life around. He was exactly where he would have wished his life to be. Why did God take him now?”