At the height of their fame, controversial preacher Gilbert Deya and his wife Mary hobnobbed with the high and mighty and hogged the limelight in Kenya and the United Kingdom with his claims that he could make barren women conceive overnight.
He once claimed that he was a personal spiritual guide of Nasa presidential candidate Raila Odinga.
The website of his Gilbert Deya Ministries — based in Peckham, South London — shows him wearing a suit as he meets the Queen and Prince Philip.
These were the high points of the career of a preacher who took advantage of women’s inability to bear children to build a cult following. He claims he has 34,000 church members in the UK.
Mr Deya made headlines in 2004, when BBC investigated his declaration that he had enabled some women to become pregnant “through the power of prayer”.
“The miracle babies in our ministry are beyond human imagination … It is not something I can say I can explain because they are of God and things of God cannot be explained by a human being,” he told the BBC .
But allegations of child trafficking, which Mr Deya denies, painted a darker picture.
Around the same time, there were reports of children going missing in Nairobi.
Ten children, none of whom had any genetic connection to the Deya family, were found at Mr Deya’s house in Milimani Estate, Nairobi.
Twenty other babies were placed in foster care after DNA tests showed they had no connection to the women said to be their mothers.
Mrs Elizabeth Njenga narrated to the court in Nairobi how her newborn baby was stolen from her at Pumwani Hospital soon after she gave birth. The baby is said to have been given to the Deyas.
She had this to say: “I asked, ‘What about the baby? Can you give the child to me?’”
Mrs Njenga, who had given birth by caesarean section, went on: “The nurse told me, ‘No, you are in pain, you must sleep, forget about the child until you have recovered’.”
Her child was among a group of 20 children who were taken into protective custody after the police broke a child kidnapping ring in 2004.
The Kenya police first issued an arrest warrant against Mr Deya in 2004 for allegedly abducting children aged between one and four between 1999 and 2004.
In 2007, his wife was convicted of kidnapping four children and sentenced to a total of three years in prison.
While she served her sentence, Mr Deya mounted a series of legal challenges against Kenya’s request to have him deported to face trial at home. He was finally brought back this week.
Aided by human rights laws, Mr Deya repeatedly came up with new ways to prevent his return — including claims that he could face the death sentence and allegations that inmates are tortured in Kenyan prisons. However, a judge in the UK described as “scandalous” the inordinate delay in extraditing him.
Despite the legal controversy surrounding him, Mr Deya had remained active, overseeing a satellite TV channel broadcasting in Africa and Europe, an online radio channel and churches all over the UK.
In February 2016, the self-proclaimed “Archbishop of Peckham”, a neighbourhood in south London, was exposed for selling olive oil as a miracle cure for HIV and cancer. Mr Deya claimed the “power of God” helped give the oil “magical properties”.
In 2009, Mr Macharia wa Gakuru, a UK-based Kenyan biomedical engineer who interacted closely with the preacher, wrote a biography of the preacher titled Deya and the Miracle Babies .
He described Mr Deya’s ministry thus: “His brand of religion is a unique combination of traditional African religions and beliefs peppered with threats of curses but tempered with exorcisms and stirred with Christianity.”
According to the book, Mr Deya was born in 1952 in Juja, Kiambu District, to Mr Samuel Oyanda Deya and Mrs Monica Nono Deya, a poor couple that worked in sisal plantations in Thika but whose ancestral roots are in Sakwa, Bondo District.
While Monica was a devout member of the Anglican Church of Kenya, Samuel was a temperamental alcoholic, who often battered his wife, an issue that caused much friction between father and son.
Samuel declined to take the young Gilbert to school, saying he was stubborn and ungrateful. His uncle Malaki Owili took up the responsibility of educating him.
The author reveals that Mr Deya had his “Road to Damascus” moment in 1967, through a revelation that prompted him to give his life to Christ. His first convert was his father, the book reveals.
After doing a series of menial jobs in Kisumu, among them being a watchman, Mr Deya found himself in Uganda in the early 1970s where he met Mr Bildad Kaggia, one of Kenya’s independence liberation heroes.
Mr Kaggia was one of the founders of the African Independent Churches which he hoped would Africanise Christianity. He was the founder of the Revival Christian Fellowship in Kampala, where Mr Deya went to worship.
It was at this church where he met a young girl called Mary Anyango, then aged 14, who later became his wife. He was 21 years old then. The couple returned to Kenya and later Mr Deya found a job as a salesman at a textile company in Nairobi.
In 1978, he set up a parallel company to rival that of his bosses and was promptly sacked when he was found out.
But he had a keen eye for business and he set up several of them, including selling underwear in bulk.
His flagship company was Deya Shoes, which caught the eye of President Daniel arap Moi during one of the Agricultural Society of Kenya shows in the 1980s.
However, the nascent factory caught fire one day, reducing all his investments to ashes.
Raila Odinga (centre) in a past photo with the family of Archbishop Gilbert Deya (second left). PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
The author says Mr Deya started his first church, called the Salvation of Jesus Christ Church, in 1976 in Kibera.
He told the author that he became so successful that he attracted the high and mighty, among then Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka, the mastermind of the 1982 failed military coup against President Moi.
“My church ministry expanded to other parts of the city of Nairobi and we had branches in Pumwani, Kasarani, Kibo and Kibera, among other places. All these were poor parts of the city as these are the people I could reach out to,” he told the author.
However, the government refused to register the church and he and a friend started a new one called the United International Life Ministry of Churches, but he split in 1988 to form his own ministry called the United Evangelical Ministry.
In the 1990s, Mr Deya moved to London after what he claims were attempts made on his life by fellow pastors who were not happy with his success.
He told the author that this enmity was sparked by his attempts to take over the Morris Cerullo World Evangelism mission in Kenya.
Mr Cerullo is a renowned American preacher, who held a series of high-profile crusades in Kenya in the 1990s. During one of his visits in 1990, he schemed to get the attention of the preacher.
“I used my money and influence to pay members of the press … I bribed them, told them that I was to be at the airport to receive the most respected international preacher.
I was assured of meeting him next to the private jet on the runway and accompanying him to the VIP lounge. We started walking towards the VIP lounge as I carried Cerullo’s Bible … All eyes were burning holes in me,” said Mr Deya.
He said he was also at hand to welcome President Moi to Cerullo’s crusade in Pangani. “I was now a different person,” he said.
Soon after this, he adopted the title “Archbishop”. As the chairman of the United Evangelical Churches of Kenya, he supported President Moi in the 1992 General Election.
His stand put him at a crossroads with the National Council of Churches of Kenya, a coalition of mainstream churches that had teamed up with the opposition against Mr Moi’s rule.
“The president was so impressed with our support that he decided to give us land,” he said. At the time, he was mainly preaching from a hotel on Haile Selassie Avenue, close to where Bishop Margaret Wanjiru of the Jesus is Alive Ministries leads services.
In 1995, Mr Deya visited London for the first time at the invitation of a Ghanaian preacher who was living in the UK. The following year, Mr Deya and his wife closed their ministry in Kenya and moved to the UK as missionaries where they registered the Gilbert Deya Ministries and became the focus of much controversy almost immediately.
The Deyas have 13 children of their own. They lost the first born Peter to malnutrition while their last born Jeremiah died in 2004. Two of them were adopted from his late brother.
