She soared above physical disability to get top job

By MACHUA KOINANGE

Josephata Wekobe, 53, has been a fighter all her life and she has the scars to prove it.

In fact, nothing has been handed to her on a silver platter.At three feet and nine inches, she has no hands or fingers. Her arms stretch up to her elbows, about the size of a ruler and they end there.

If she stands on her right leg, her strongest, she can reach up to four feet. Her remarkable journey to the top began in March 1960, when she was born.

When Josephata was born, her disability was not just confined to her height. She has two tiny arms and no fingers.

Her right arm has a fist the size of a golf ball and her left hand has two tightly grown fingers merged together.

But she surpassed her parents’ expectations through primary and high school against insurmountable odds. Finally, she leapt across the pinnacle of academic success at the University of Nairobi in 1985.

What is amazing is that Josephata has perfected the art of doing things for herself. Last week, she broke the glass ceiling and made history. She is the first disabled person to be appointed Principal Secretary in the office of Co-ordination and the Presidency, no small achievement for the girl who grew up in Kasembewo, in Vihiga County.

HISTORICAL MOMENT

She stood out like a spectral in the mist as President Uhuru unveiled his nominees for principal secretaries on Friday, June 7. She has been a top human resource person in the Government. For Josephata, the historical moment doesn’t seem to have sunk in. “I have become used to being stared at all my life,” she admits.

Her father, Cornell Mukobe, was an electrical engineer with Kenya Railways in Nairobi and her mother, Sophia, a housewife.  She knew she was different by the time she was heading to primary school.

All her siblings — she is the eldest of eight children, five brothers and three girls — grew up normally. She probably expected her parents to explain the world to her, tell her why she was different and possibly tell her they could make things right. “I never asked my father why I was different. I just found myself so comfortable about it,” she says. In the swinging sixties, disability was unheard of and her mother bore the brunt of the village’s cruel whispers. They blamed her mostly behind her back with annoying stories of how “she must have abused someone”. Or at worst that Wekobe’s condition was some form of punishment for something unexplained.

Looking back, Josephata believes society then frowned upon disability mostly out of outdated cultural norms. Instead, she embraced her disability born out of what she speculates was a result of medication that women took during the early 1960s.

When expectant, the drug conceivably had side effects.

Because of her condition, she joined school a year late. Without hands, her family did not know if she could write and assumed she was not ready.  But Josephata refused to sit quietly like a lizard on a multicoloured tree waiting to be discovered. She was going to take charge of her life. So she started with her short arms, teaching herself how to eat.

SINGLE STEP

With that single step, she figured out how to do many other things. Her own school of learning focused on the way she walked, how to tightly hold a pen, spoon or a fork to eat – the things that so many of us take for granted.

Essentially, she reinvented her abilities with no specialised teacher. “I had to learn how to bathe on my own. I was tired of being bathed by my mother. I had to learn how to wash my own clothes.” Where her parents could not make up for her challenges, they ensconced her with emotional support. They loved her as she was. But her situation also had its advantages too.

“I was just a funny kid. In fact, I was loved more by my relatives, except maybe a few, because I was so small that they used to carry me. Because I was different they thought they should be there for me,” she explains.

Her primary school was a short distance from their rural home and she walked ten minutes across the main road without many inhibitions. But finally going to school felt like baptism by fire – especially a regular school in her situation.

She says: “To me there was no difference between me and the other children. I did not see the difference. We were playing together and when they wrote, I wrote too. Whatever they could do, I did too.” She continues: “I was disadvantaged but not so much disadvantaged. I could open doors by myself.”

“I ranged between position one and three. They treated me like any other student.” That helped to make her feel at ease and allowed her to perform to her best abilities. From her fellow classmates, however, she had to endure stares and taunting for her figure.

“As a kid, you are so innocent about being stared at. It never bothered me that time, but in hindsight now it does. Kids would look at me and tell me your disability is so bad or call me names. It never held me back.”

Instead, she responded to the stares with the best way she knew how, with her brain and wit. Her favourite subject was mathematics and she can remember two of her treasured teachers- Ethna Olwali and Sophia Omuruli- who encouraged her. So did her former headmaster, Francis Okiiri.

“My father felt challenged by my condition and asked ‘what will I do with her when she grows up?’ So I had to step up and show him I could be something.” Her resilience paid off when she sat for her Certificate of Primary education (CPE) exams.

The results were released one January morning in 1974. As sunlight crept into their compound at daybreak, Josephata says: “My former headmaster, Mr Okiiri, came rushing through our front gate looking excited. It was around 10 am to 11am and I was at home with my parents.

He was holding my results and proudly announced how well I had performed.” She had been outstanding to her parent’s utter amazement, having passed with three A’s, the maximum any student could attain.

EXCITEMENT

Her heart leapt in excitement at the announcement. It was enough to get accepted to the prestigious Alliance Girls High School for her secondary education.  It was this transition that brutally brought her face to face with her disability.

“At Alliance, my first challenge was getting there from home. I had to take the train to Kikuyu and disembark with my luggage. I could not carry my suitcase and I had to ask for help. Then I had to get help or drag the suitcase to the waiting school bus. It was a challenge,” she recalls.

Her hands were her biggest challenge, but how she surmounted that and turned them into a force to her advantage is even more remarkable. After her graduation from the University of Nairobi , she was employed by the Public Service Commission.