“If they had put their hand on my heart, they would have stopped me — it was pumping like a water pump!”
So recalled Isaac Newton Kinity, sitting in his Elm Street apartment in New Haven, of his escape across the border of Kenya after his defiant union and anti-corruption work drew death threats.
Six years later after Kinity’s escape, the era of billion-dollar swindles and high-ranking corruption under former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi is slowly coming to light. That president is out of power and Kinity and his family have been safe in the U.S. for four years. And Kinity, a onetime national union leader, is a political refugee harbored in New Haven.
As he recalled his harrowing journey, Kinity sat on the very edge of the couch, fully engaged from the first moment. He leaned forward, hands active, voice bearing urgency. He cut to the point. In Nakuru, Kenya, he worked as a civil servant, one of half a million government employees joined by a trade union for over 20 years. In 1980, a change of regime cut back workers’ rights: President Moi issued a decree invalidating the union.
“The main purpose was to make room for the looting of public funds,” said Kinity. “Civil servants were left at the mercy of the politicians who would hire and fire them.”
Kinity started to talk to diplomats about what he thought was going on. He thought civil servants were being “used as tools to loot public funds” and needed a defense. Citing workers’ stagnant salaries, Kinity started to talk about bringing the union back. In 1992, “Things started becoming rough.” Security officials would “ask me why I was challenging the authority of the president. They called me a ‘dissident.’”
By 1996, he became convinced the government wanted to stop him. So he tried to make sure they didn’t: In a brazen move, he rallied workers and, defying the government order, declared, “We have revived the union.”
“We told the government we had started and we were not going to stop.”
“The government became so concerned, furious… I was arrested so many times, grilled vigorously. They asked me who are behind me —‚Äù they think when you challenge the government you want to overturn it.” They took his documents.
Once, a woman came to the door at night asking for directions. Suspicious, he didn’t go out. “I peeped through a small hole in the door —‚Äù there were so many people with guns.”
In January, 1998, he was sitting in a hotel in Nakuru when, amid commotion, he felt something prick him. “I had a very sharp thing penetrate my back, but the sharpness was superceded by a burn.” He thought it was a cigarette, but the burn, then sickness, persisted for days. He was convinced government-backed agents were out to kill him.
At the third attempt, on Christmas Eve in 1999, a freak sickness turned out to save his life. While he lay in a hospital in a different city, a band of men back home “entered the house brandishing guns. That’s when I said I have to escape.” When he later went home, police were sweeping the streets for him. “They knew if I escaped I would talk about it, and I was friends with diplomats.”
Kinity cut off his long beard, grabbed his oldest son and set off for the border. After harrowing scrapes with police and a long ride cramped on the floor of a bus, they made a mad dash for Uganda on the back seats of local bicycle-taxis.
“Go quickly, as if you are going to be late,” he told his son. That was when Kinity’s heart beat so fast that someone could have killed him, he said, just by placing a hand on it. But no one did. Father and son were safe.
Back in Kenya, “my wife never stayed in the house. It was a ghost house.” One morning, as Kinity lay sick with worry for the family, his son Ben snuck back to Kenya to rescue his mother and six siblings. A month later, Kinity was checking into a hospital when he got word of their return: “I became a person who was not sick at all —‚Äù I was running to pick them up, tears were running down, they were there!”
The family lived in Uganda for two years before, with the help of the United Nations and American Embassy, they were flown to New Haven as political refugees.
Now his country is seeing some progress on the goals he sought: The Kenyan Civil Servants Union was legalized in 2002. Kinity is watching a successful anti-corruption campaign unfold. With a 91-page report detailing corruption including a billion-dollar gold-and-diamond scam, former Kenyan anti-corruption chief John Githongo has been making headway. Three ministers have resigned following corruption allegations.
Though former President Moi was deposed two years ago, Kinity’s still not sure it’s safe to return. From his new home in New Haven, where he’s taken a job working with metal lathes, he listens to reports of hunger and drought back home and longs to help. He’s trying to gain support for the fledgling Kikimo Foundation for Corruption & Poverty Eradication, a non-profit he hopes will target areas of Africa in need. Anyone interested is welcome to contact him by e‑mail.