Zack Kimotho and the true story of his trip to South Africa

From left, Kenya Paraplegic Organisation Chairman Mwaura Ngari, Zachary Kimotho and Executive Director Tim Wanyonyi at the end of phase one of the Bring Zack Back Home campaign on Friday near the Namanga border. PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • In June 2012 the man in the middle of this photo threatened to wheel himself on a journey of over 4,000 kilometres for spinal cord treatment, but only made it a few metres past Kajiado.
  • The truth, it turns out, was that he never intended to go beyond Kitengela! Inside, the absolute genius of his public relations machine
  • A combination of factors, including, as we shall see in a moment, the death of Internal Security Cabinet minister George Saitoti in a plane crash, made it difficult for them to get all the attention they needed.

When, three years ago, this man said he was going to wheel himself to South Africa for medical treatment, he got the nation talking.

What many did not know, however, was that the campaign organisers had never intended to see him past Kitengela.

They had planned to raise enough awareness about spinal cord injuries by the time Zack wheeled himself into the dusty town off the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, but a combination of factors, including, as we shall see in a moment, the death of Internal Security Cabinet minister George Saitoti in a plane crash, made it difficult for them to get all the attention they needed.

 

In June 2012 Kenyans and the world were treated to the rare spectacle of a man threatening to travel over 4,000 kilometres on a wheelchair. Mr Zack Kimotho, wheelchair-bound after a carjacker shot a bullet through his spinal cord, wanted to travel to South Africa in a bid to raise money to set up a specialised hospital in the country to address the needs of those, like him, who needed paraplegic care.

The 44-year-old had been chosen by the Kenya Paraplegic Organisation (KPO) to be the face of the ‘Bring Zack Back Home’ campaign, which also hoped to raise awareness about the plight of people living with spinal cord injuries as well as help raise Sh250 million for the construction of the first spinal injury centre in Kenya — and the fourth in Africa, after Egypt, South Africa and Nigeria.

As fate would have it, however, Zack never made it to South Africa, and last week we traced him to his Nairobi home to ask him what had happened. Also, because of the huge public interest his campaign had raised, we wanted to know whether he had achieved his Sh250 million target, and, if so, where the money was.

Zack wheeled himself for about 150 kilometres before calling it off somewhere near Kajiado town on the Kitengela-Namanga road.

His media relations team had told journalists that he planned to cross the border into Tanzania, and the onwards (probably) into Malawi on the journey south, so what made him turn back so early?

A ROBBER'S BULLET

“I had raised about Sh73 million by the time I turned back,” he said last week. And, for a man whose life was changed dramatically by a robber’s bullet, that was no small feat. Still, many had expected that he would soldier on, the challenges notwithstanding, and at least cross into Tanzania.

What many did not know, however, was that the campaign organisers had never intended to see Zack struggle his way past Kitengela.

Deputy president Wiliam Ruto brings Zack Back Home. The deputy president said that the government would support the initiative by Kenya Paraplegic Organisation and gave personal contribution of Sh3million. PHOTO | PONCIANO ODONGO | FILE

They had planned to raise enough awareness about paraplegics by the time Zack wheeled himself into the dusty town off the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, but a combination of factors — including, as we shall see in a moment, the death of Internal Security Cabinet minister George Saitoti in a plane crash — had made it difficult for them to get all the attention they needed.

To understand the thinking behind the campaign, we need to go back to 2004, for this, really, was the year Zack began his journey on a wheelchair.

Then a healthy, middle-aged man, Zack was driving from Nairobi to Kikuyu at about 2pm when he stopped at the narrow intersection that feeds town-bound traffic into the busy Nairobi-Limuru highway near Kikuyu town.

He stopped for a few seconds, waiting for the traffic to clear so that he could join the acceleration lane, when a car appeared from nowhere, screeched past him and stopped a few metres ahead.

He was still trying to understand what was happening when a man stepped out of the car with his hands raised in the air and started walking towards him. Behind him, another man emerged, uneasy and fast. Zack watched, his hands still on the steering wheel and the right foot on the brakes.

Maybe he should have floored it. Maybe he should have put the car in gear and spun it out of the way of those two men, but he didn’t. Somehow, he was transfixed by the events unfolding in front of him, his reflexes somehow frozen into inaction.

One of them came to his side and ordered him to open the door.

What? he thought to himself. What? Carjack me? In the middle of the day on one of the region’s busiest roads? How?

“Such lawlessness is the preserve of the night,” Zack reasoned last week. For some reason — most probably the frozen nerves that had made him a sitting, lame duck — Zack could not bring himself to reach for the central locking button on the driver’s door.

The man, now making his intentions clear, showed him a gun to prompt him to action, but that only froze Zack even more. The man must have thought Zack was trying to play tough as he shouted in Kiswahili: “Mjinga, unaona hii ni nini niko nayo! (You fool, can’t you see what I am carrying!).”

That jolted him, and now he started fumbling with his seat belt so that he could jump to the back seat, where he had been ordered to move. The man kept barking orders at Zack, the muzzle of the gun staring menacingly at him.

He was still fumbling with his seat belt when the man pulled the trigger. The bullet, fired at close range, had enough velocity to shatter his shoulder and spinal cord.

STARTING ANEW

The shock made him lift his right foot off the brake pedal as the men scampered off, their carjacking mission having failed. Zack, now badly injured and his body going into shock, could not control the car as it started rolling downhill before being stopped by a curb.

Witnesses rushed to his aid and took him to a nearby hospital, where doctors raced to save his life. When he was stabilised, one of them told him that they had good and bad news to break to him. The good was that he would live, the bad that he would never walk again as the bullet had broken his spinal column, the skeletal axis that protects the spinal cord.

“The news hit me hard,” he remembered. And, for him, this had come at the worst possible time. Just a few months earlier his wife had passed away, and then he had lost his job, and now he had lost his ability to walk. Tragedy, it seemed, had decided to camp in his life.

A native of Murang’a County and a University of Nairobi Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine graduate, class of 1994, Zack almost lost all hope. Jobless, widowed, badly injured and left with a two-year-old son to raise, he decided to pick himself up by finding a job, but a man on a wheelchair is not such an attractive proposition to most employers.

Zack Kimotho during an interview with journalists at his Nairobi home on April 9, 2015. PHOTO | ANTHONY OMUYA

“I tried starting a business but it never worked out since the office was in town as the hassles of travelling to Nairobi proved too much. It’s then that I opted to start my own business, selling animal products from the comfort of my home,” he said.

A few months after that incident, and as he learnt to live the new life fate had thrust upon him, he became a member of the Kenya Paraplegic Organisation, where he met another wheelchair-bound man named Tim Wanyonyi.

Wanyonyi, who would later become the MP for Westlands and executive director of the organisation, had been, like Zack, confined to a wheelchair by a bullet from a carjacker’s illegal gun, in 1998.

“I was only 26 and fresh from law school when I lost my ability to walk,” Hon Wanyonyi told DN2. “Thugs accosted and shot at me at Ngara, Nairobi.”

After the incident, Hon Wanyoyi was rushed to Aga Khan Hospital, where he stayed for a month. For almost two weeks, he did not know about the seriousness of his injury as everyone, including the doctors, was afraid to tell him the truth.

“Every time my wife walked into the room she would burst into tears,” he said. “She knew about my condition, and so did the doctors, but none of them wanted to say anything. One day, a friend of mine who is also a doctor asked me if anyone had disclosed to me about the nature of my injury, and that’s when I knew things were bad.”

Like Zack, Hon Wanyonyi was devastated, but his family organised for him to be flown to a hospital in Brussels, Belgium for “thorough management” of his condition.

BIRTH OF A CAMPAIGN

Two months later and Sh9 million the poorer, Hon Wanyonyi flew back home, still minus the ability to walk. That experience, however, was not in vain, because it hatched in him the idea of starting a campaign to highlight the plight of many other people who could not afford specialised medical attention, or even, in some cases, wheelchairs.

“Kenya has only one government-run hospital that takes care of spinal injuries, but the hospital does not have the facilities you’d find in other places like India or South Africa,” said Hon Wanyonyi.

The MP and his team approached donors and public relations firms for sponsorship and awareness creation, and eventually the ‘Bring Zack Back Home’ campaign was born. However, even though they had the campaign well mapped out, they still did not have the man, or woman, who would become its face.

To get the right candidate, they decided to carry out auditions, and Zack was chosen as the one who had the frame of mind and strength of body to undertake the challenge. Also, said Hon Wanyonyi, Zack “was well articulated and educated”.

The team then sat down again to brainstorm on ideas that would endear Kenyans and the world to the campaign. And then they asked themselves: Where is the nearest spinal injury rehabilitation center? The answer? South Africa. Zack was going to provoke debate by threatening to wheel himself to South Africa, and they were going to make as much noise about it as possible.

This was going to be a protest campaign built on hashtags and riding on emotions. It was pillared on the notion that if Kenyans did not contribute, then Zack would wheel himself all the way to South Africa.

“I talked about it with my family — sister Leah Kimotho and son Daniel — and they both encouraged and supported me to go ahead with the campaign since it was for a good cause,” he said.

When the day came, the team gave him a new wheelchair and a team of ambulance, security, and media personnel to accompany him on the road to South Africa — or, in their minds, Kitengela. On Twitter, #BringZackBackHome became a top trending topic.

A few kilometres after being flagged off, however, the public relations gimmick started falling apart; and then, on June 10, then Internal Security minister George Saitoti, his Assistant Orwa Ojode, and six other people died in a helicopter crash at the Kibiku area of Ngong.

Zack and his campaign, all of a sudden, were no longer an attractive news idea as journalists turned the camera lenses away from them and rushed to cover the crash. The media frenzy around the event took around two weeks to die down, hugely affecting Zack’s campaign.

The organisers had banked heavily on as much hype from the media as possible to sensitise Kenyans and other donors to contribute funds towards the project, and their plans of getting enough funding by the time Zack rolled into Kitengela were dashed.

“The less media attention we got, the less money we raised,” explained Hon Wanyonyi.

Zack Kimotho with his son Stephen Kimotho during an interview with journalists at his Nairobi home on April 9, 2015. PHOTO | ANTHONY OMUYA

After raising Sh73 million, Zack and his team called off the campaign after getting slightly past Kajiado. The public relations trick had worked well, but other things had stood in their way.

The money, he said, is now being used to build a spinal cord rehabilitation centre in Olooloitikosh, Kajiado County. The centre’s foundation stone was laid by Deputy President William Ruto in August 2013.

The idea did not go according to plan, Zack admits, but it still got them enough money to get them moving. As the centre at Olooloitikosh comes up, he will continue receiving therapy at his Doonholm home, and banking on his 13-year-old son, Daniel, to help him run the house.

Zack is back home. He may go to South Africa in the near future, but chances of that journey being made on a wheelchair are quite, quite slim.

 

What’s better that a man walking on the moon? A man walking again! 

Dareky Fidyka, 45, was paralysed from the chest down after a brutal knife attack, but has been able to walk again after a medical breakthrough made possible by surgeons in Poland and a team of scientists in London.

Fidyka, a Pole who was repeatedly stabbed in the back by thugs in 2010, described walking again as “an incredible feeling”. Prof Geoff Raisman, head of neural regeneration at University College London’s Institute of Neurology, spearheaded the London research team.

He described the achievement as “more impressive than man walking on the moon” and clarified that he and his team neither did it for glory nor for financial gain. The delicate process used olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) that form part of the sense of smell.

Surgeons removed one of Fidyka’s olfactory bulbs and grew the cells in culture.

They then transplanted the OECs into the spinal cord through 100 small injections above and below the injury.

Four thin strips of nerve tissue were then taken from his ankle and placed across a gap of approximately 8mm on the cord’s left side. The OECs, through a pathway, facilitated the fibres above and below the injury to rejoin using nerve grafts to connect the aperture in the cord injured during the attack.

 

Road accidents, not gang attacks, are the leading cause of back injuries 

Although Zack Kimotho, Hon Tim Wanyoyi and Dareky Fidyka all suffered spinal injuries after botched robberies, most Kenyans are injured through road accidents.

According to a 2014 report titled Combating Road Traffic Accidents in Kenya: A Challenge for an Emerging Economy, by Charles G Manyara, associate professor of Geo-Informatics at Radford University, US, road accidents are a major cause of death and disability in the country. Globally, of the 23 to 34 million people injured in road accidents annually, close to of 1.24 million die.

This makes road accidents the ninth ranked cause of death in the world, and that ranking is projected to rise to third place by 2020. An estimated 85 per cent of the deaths occur in developing countries, where 65 per cent of the victims are pedestrians, of which 35 per cent are children. In Kenya, close to 3,000 people die in road accidents every year, most of them between the ages of 15 and 44 years.

The cost to the economy from these accidents is in excess of US50 million, exclusive of the actual loss of life.

Studies show that the causes, frequency and severity of road traffic injuries are connected to a poor driving culture, badly designed and neglected roads, and inadequate enforcement of existing traffic laws.

Take care of your back, but do not be mortified by that slight pain

A spinal cord injury is damage to any part of the spinal cord or nerves at the end of the spinal canal which often causes permanent changes in strength, sensation and other body functions below the site of the injury.

For one to completely lose sensation, the blow has to be severe and completely sever the spinal cord, so do not worry about that slight back pain you are experiencing.

It could be relieved through losing weight, improving posture, avoiding falls, exercising, avoiding heavy lifting, and applying heat or ice to the painful area.