‘Patient’ and ‘caring’ are words that one could swear are hostile to the Kenyan political realm, a space populated more with violence and strife than the humanism this legislator espouses.
Even as he shuns from noisy rallies in favour of more intimate door-to-door campaigns during his electioneering period, Tim prides himself on his ability to listen and act on people’s needs.
Timothy Wanyonyi is a Kenyan member of Parliament (MP) representing Westlands constituency in Nairobi county. He represents people living with disabilities in Parliament. He is a Member of Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and a coalition member of Coalition for Reforms and Democracy.
Born in Mukhweya in Bungoma town, Timothy Wanyonyi is the seventh born child to Anne and Dominic Wetang’ula, a farmer and teacher respectively. Tim is a family man with two girls and a son.
A car robbery incident in 1998 led to an irreparable spinal injury, which has since confined him to a wheelchair. Prior to joining politics in 2007, Tim had been practising law for 11 years and championing for rights for persons with disability.
Tim had left office at 7:15 pm. It was approaching 8pm. The friend Tim was taking home was his own cousin, Bramuel Simiyu.
After his cousin had alighted from the car and safely walking past the gate to his residential building, Tim reversed the car and he was just about to zoom off when he noticed a young man on the driver’s right hand side asking him to lower the window.
He did so. But then immediately realised that he was in grave danger; he noticed the young man holding a pistol wrapped in a black polythene paper and pointing its muzzle at him while ordering him to get out.
The armed robber shot Tim in the back and smashed his spinal cord, a heinous act that would confine the young father to a wheel-chair the rest of his life.
Tim quietly opened the driver’s door, left the car with keys still in the ignition and raised his hands in the air as he walked away. The robbers entered the car and started to drive away.
But as he turned to look at the departing thieves, he heard one of them shout “Shoot him! Shoot him!”. At that point he felt something hit him in his back.
“I felt nothing at that moment,” Tim said. “It did not sound painful at the time. What I realised was that I was not able to rise up. In fact, people were passing around and asking what I was doing there until one good Samaritan turned up and took me to the Aga Khan hospital.”
Following his own incident, he founded the Kenya Paraplegic Organisation in 2004, an organisation that helps people with spinal cord problems. Tim’s role models in politics range from Raila, to Margaret Thatcher; and from James Orengo to Mwai Kibaki and Julius Nyerere.
Hon Wanyonyi is one of the founders of KPO, he is Kenya Paraplegic Organisation (KPO) executive director. The organizers of ‘Bring Zack Back Home’ campaign which was aimed to build the first spinal injury rehabilitation centre in Kenya.
He once narrated how. He said that in 1998, carjackers shot him just a few metres after dropping a friend in
“I had to travel to a rehabilitation centre in Belgium. It cost my family 10 million shillings for a three-month stay at the hospital. The Kenyan embassy in Brussels, Belgium, stood guarantee until we finished paying the amount two years later,” he said.
His struggles in accessing treatment motivated him and other paraplegics to start a spinal cord rehabilitation centre in Kenya. Before Zachary Kimotho’s (Zack) campaign, the organization would hold a fundraising twice every year, where they would collect about Sh 1 million.
With that money, they bought a