Residents call for sobriety from political leaders for country to address horrors of Shakahola massacre

Nyeri, Thursday, May 4, 2023

KNA by Samuel Maina /Yvette Kimani

A section of Nyeri residents is now calling for cessation of political grandstanding between the Government and opposition to allow room to unearth what really led to the chilling deaths in Shakahola fields.

The residents aver that it would be a show of utter contempt by political leaders in the country to continue pursuing parochial interests at a time a section of the country is still reeling in shock from what transpired at Shakahola where 109 bodies of persons believed to be followers of ‘pastor’ Paul Mackenzie of Good News International have been exhumed.

Mackenzie is currently in police custody after he was rearrested upon his release by a Malindi court on Tuesday this week.

Police are planning to prefer terrorism charges against the self-styled preacher.

Purity Muthoni, a businesswoman, has told KNA it beats logic for politicians to be shouting at each other and inciting the public against one another through endless street demos while the country has serious issues to address.

Muthoni is also faulting the opposition for engaging the public in violent protests that only end up in ruining the country’s fragile economy instead of solving the people’s problems.

“We are still in shock as a country following what transpired at Shakahola where scores of innocent lives were cut short at the altar of lopsided religious dogma. My appeal therefore is to appeal to both the Government and Opposition to put the nation’s interest first and set up an inquiry that will ensure both the victims and their families are accorded the necessary justice. Resumption of street demos will never solve the country’s ills but only aggravate them further,” said Muthoni.

Her sentiments are echoed by Peter Mwenda who says recent demonstrations by the Azimio la Umoja One Kenya alliance have only resulted in massive looting, deaths and destruction of private property and therefore are a sharp contrast to the initial objective.

Mwenda says it would be much beneficial to the public if politicians agreed to set aside their partisan differences and concentrate on matters affecting the electorate.

“I do not see how people benefit from taking part in protests that only result in untold havoc, closure of businesses, injuries and even deaths. If the object of taking to the streets is to advocate for lowering the cost of living, why don’t we take advantage of the ongoing rains and do something useful instead of wasting time complaining?” he poses.

He has also called for the arrest of all those who took part in the murder of innocent persons at Shakahola farm alleging that it is inconceivable for anyone to undertake such atrocities singlehanded.

“While unravelling the secrets surrounding the massacre at Shakahola, we need to understand how one man was able to indoctrinate so many people before eventually luring them to their graves. The country should also get to the bottom of how the main suspect managed to acquire such a vast piece of land and whether there were other faces who were funding his activities,” he observes.

“There’s no way only one man was burying all those bodies and manipulating all those people. Another bigger question is who actually sold Mackenzie that 800-acre piece of land and who else could have been funding his activities at the time?” he posed further.

Last week a cleric in Nyeri blamed local administrators for the deaths of adherents of the suspected religious cult.

Speaking to KNA yesterday, Bishop Erastus Njoroge who is the overseer of Four-Square Gospel Churches of Kenya said it was unacceptable for such a horrendous ritual to take place anywhere in the country without the knowledge of law enforcement officers.

Njoroge while condemning those behind the heinous incident insisted that the blame lies squarely on chiefs and police for not being proactive enough in arresting the situation before it went out of hand.

“What happened in Kilifi is beyond words and totally unacceptable. It is equally shocking that such atrocities could have gone unnoticed by both local administrators and detectives for days and only surfaced after bodies of people were discovered buried deep in the forests. And if the officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations had a wind about the ongoings of the rogue pastor (Paul Mackenzie) of Good News International, why did they not act on time?” posed the bishop.

The cleric also described Mackenzie (the main suspect in the macabre deaths) as a cult leader whose activities should be a wakeup call for the authorities to be on the lookout for the presence of eccentric religious groups that could be operating in the country.

Njoroge has called for an enactment of a Religious Act to address the threat being posed by the mushrooming of countless churches in the country with shady and questionable doctrines that in many ways end up hoodwinking gullible followers into their ranks only for them to lose their possessions or worse still their lives.

“We need an Act of Parliament to help curb the growing number of unregulated religious groups coming up with strange doctrines and teachings. I presented such a proposal to Parliament in 2021 but nothing has ever come out of this since then despite assurance that the matter had been handed over to the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee. The proposal for the State to regulate the church affairs will however not work since these are two distinct arms and totally separate in their functions. The work of the State is purely administrative while the role of the church's mandate is to serve the spiritual needs of the masses,” he stated.      

Mackenzie (currently in custody) is believed to be the mastermind of the bizarre rituals in which followers of his church are believed to have been indoctrinated to the point of starving themselves to death in anticipation of a glorious afterlife.

Police believe some of the victims whose bodies have been discovered from the site   might have actually been brutally murdered before their remains were interred in a dozen shallow graves scattered in the farm associated with the self-styled cleric.

Police who have already sealed the forest and declared it a crime scene believe there could be more bodies still buried in dozens of shallow graves in the area.

On Tuesday last week the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB) called for a review of proposals in the Religious Societies Rules 2015, saying the self-regulation provision currently in place has been jeopardised by the resistance of leadership structures and systems in some churches.

“It is our considered opinion that if a strong mechanism of regulating religions was in place, the long arm of the law would have stopped Pastor Mackenzie from taking advantage of Kenyans to engage in acts of mass suicide,” KCCB Chairperson Martin Kivuva said.

“It is very unfortunate that we are witnessing a worrying reality in the country where so-called prophets and cultic leaders have mastered the art of exploiting gullible Kenyans in the name of religion,” continued his statement

Courtesy; K.N.A