My dog Bambina, Bambi for short, reminds me of me. She starts digging a hole, she can’t stop, she keeps going back again and again, obsessively until a section of the garden is ruined.
The Shakahola massacre happened in February and March 2023 and even as I transitioned out of the media, I couldn’t keep my mind out of the biggest and most painful stories of our lives.
It was quite clear that you couldn’t confront a worse, more vile evil if you drove up to the gates of hell itself and asked to be taken to the landlord.
Three years later and with a hole in my savings big enough to sail an aircraft carrier through, I am where I was in February 2023. Like my dog, digging, obsessing.
The news that Enos Amanya Ngala alias Halleluya has changed his plea and admitted that he took part in crimes and participated in events which led to the death of 429 people, among them six of his children and his younger brother, poured fuel to the embers of this burning story.
I interviewed his only surviving child, Veronica Natalie Amanya—who I learned just a week ago is also named Israel—multiple times before she became a State witness.
My colleagues and I have walked Paul Makenzie’s life from the family home in Lunga Lunga (their Matatu stage is now called Shakahola) in South Coast, Maweu ABC church and Primary School, where he was educated, we have visited his step mum and listened to the stories of his childhood, we have listened to villagers’ stories of the “bishop” said to have radicalised him, we followed him in Malindi where his sister lived and where he was a taxi driver before he saw the burning bush.
Shakahola cult leader Paul Mackenzie (in pink) is pictured with some of his followers at the Shanzu Law Courts in Mombasa County on May 2, 2023.
Photo credit: File I Nation Media Group
We listened to the lies of some of his family members. We listened to the fake stories of his best propagandists. We got to know him quite well, listening to all these folks.
I formed the impression that the cult is quite well organised, clever and fanatically obedient to its leadership whose messianic certainty and confidence has the power to command fairly intelligent people, it has been alleged, to commit the most painful form of suicide. These are no ordinary, poor average folk. This is an effective secret organisation.
Which is why, after three years there is no agreement as to the most fundamental part of the story: what is the motive? Why are 429 people, perhaps even more, dead? I am haunted by those dead bodies, especially the children; 182 of them. Why so many? I am yet to buy the messianic explanation, the theory that some fanatical preachers want to personally deliver souls to the Lord and are prepared to go to any lengths to do it.
To engineer the massacre of 429 people, and I am not saying for one minute that anyone did, you need to be a total nut, so crazy as to be completely unable to function as a human being, or you are a greedy cold-hearted person who stands to make lots of money and have the power of life and death over your followers.
All conspiracies are fragile, at the end of the day. One of the strings will get caught in something and the whole thing will untangle.
The authorities must resist the temptation to imagine that covering up any part of it, whether to avoid public panic or to protect certain institutions from embarrassment, is the solution.
The solution is perfect disclosure: throw aside the curtains, pour in the sunshine, let us learn and prepare better for this plague of dangerous individuals in our midst.
I read recently that a Somali arms smuggler was killed in an airstrike in Yemen, a war-torn territory awash with the most dangerous weapons – bombs, perhaps even dirty bombs, drones and lethal missiles.
It is also open territory for hardened and well-trained fighters from the various conflict zones of the Middle East.
A week ago, the police issued a detailed statement about a foiled al-Shabaab terror attack in Nairobi being planned in Daadab, the refugee settlement in North Eastern which is, unfortunately also a staging area for al-Shabaab.
Recently, the government announced a decision to fling wide open the 680-km land border between Kenya and the Republic of Somalia which has been closed for 15 years, causing distress to families which can’t visit each other with ease.
The suffering of those families is important and must be ended. My only concern is the timing of it. How does the government ensure that dangerous arms and al-Shabaab fighters don’t pour across the open border? The militant organisation’s leadership is under pressure in Somalia and some have recently been killed. In their position, I’d sneak across the border and run things from the relative obscurity of Kenya.
With an election not too far off, a time when the country is at its most delicate and fragile, wisdom would dictate holding back on this decision, preparing border communities and security agencies, and then implementing a staggered progressive re-opening.
