With permanent disability that he sustained in 2000 after being involved in a horrible road accident, Makori has had nothing to do except to sit; morning to evening, waiting for the day he will receive compensation of Sh3.7 million from an insurance firm.
Makori survived the accident alongside some few other passengers who were travelling in the ill-fated Great Southern Bus that lost control and flew into Eremo Valley in Keumbu, along the Kisii-Keroka-Sotik road.
The accident left Makori’s lower limbs heavily condemned by doctors with the left leg getting amputated and the right one being girded with steel implants.
Now, 22 years later, he is yet to receive his compensation sum from the embattled United Insurance which has been battling receivership for 13 years now.
“For the last two decades, I have been patiently waiting for the insurance firm that covered the bus that caused me all this pain but to no any avail," Makori said.
"I have sold everything I possessed to get medication year in, year out and now, I own nothing of mine except my wife, four kids and these houses you see here.”
Two single-roomed grass-thatched shanties of the same size facing each other are the only structures in the compound that Makori, 50, and his wife Margaret,45, have called home for the last three decades since they got married.
“My wife here (points at her before tapping her gently on the shoulder with the right hand), has been a great helper for me during all these years we have struggled with the aftermath of the accident,” he said.
On the fateful day, Makori, who was then working with Linear Coach Bus Company as a mechanic, was headed to Kisii town for his regular job.
“I didn’t know what exactly happened but I only woke up on the hospital bed without my left foot. I only came to hear of stories about what had happened with the bus,” he said.
Donning a badly tattered shirt, Makori halts this interview and embarks on undressing the amputated leg while seething with some distress.
After removing the home-made bandages of about seven heavy socks and cloth materials, fittingly mounted on top of each other, he finally reaches out to what he terms a “very sweet itch” on the core of the wound on the severed leg and scratches it for about two minutes.
This leg is very troublesome and that is how it has been for the last two decades.
If Makori is not in his compound, watching weaver birds that have built numerous nests on one of the eucalyptus trees growing in the compound, then he is in Nairobi being attended to by his orthopaedic doctor whom he has to see every month.
“This amputated leg has turned me into a beggar. I have to spend about Sh10,000 every month to secure clinical services in Nairobi. Surprisingly, I have never failed to attend, courtesy of friends and relatives,” he said.
After a High Court in Nairobi successfully ruled that Makori be compensated with the Sh3.7 million in 2005, the insurance company was also, at the time, going under receivership.
The court award to the victims would later face another challenge of not being paid out after United Insurance was put under receivership and statutory management under the state-owned Kenya Reinsurance Company.
The High Court even issued a warrant that required Makori and other 40 victims and families of victims of the accident to arrest assets of the embroiled company and liquidate them, but it has not happened, another 15 years later.
The battles that have derailed the compensation have been revolving around selling out United Insurance and reviving it.
A fresh court case between victims and the statutory management board is expected in court on December 1, a matter that will determine whether the company will continue with business or it will be sold out.
“We are seeing the delay for payment as one of the ways of trying to drag issue over years and there could be someone ill-bent to fleece that money. This where the President should come in and save it for weaker Kenyans like me,” Makori said.
But for now, he will have to continue waiting until such time when it shall have been known when the cash will be paid to him.
