A shocked world woke up recently to another mass deaths of gullible worshippers deceived by their religious leader.
At the last count, 109 followers of the Good News International Church, based in the Shakahola Forest of eastern Kenya, are known to have died, with 101 bodies so far recovered from shallow graves since April 21, 2023.
The leader of the group, Paul Mackenzie Nthenge, was arrested on April 15 by policemen. He is accused of encouraging his followers to starve themselves to death in order to meet Jesus. It was reported that 50 to 60 percent of the victims were children. Police have charged Paul Mackenzie Nthenge with their deaths. The pastor, however, denied the allegation, claiming he closed the church in 2019.
The Kenyan incident joins a long list of such disasters in which believers are deceived into killing themselves, or are killed by the leaders of the group.
If Nthenge is found guilty as charged, his name will be recorded in history alongside the infamous Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite, Shoko Asahara and David Koresh, notorious cult leaders who caused tens and hundreds of deaths of their followers.
One of them, American national Jim Jones, founded The People’s Temple of the Disciples of Christ in Indianapolis, USA, in1954, which combined Christianity and communist ideology.
In the scandal that came to be known as Jonestown massacre, fearing government reprisal after he ordered the shooting to death of US Representative Leo Ryan and journalists who had visited the premises of his cult to investigate its activities, Jones forced the followers to commit ‘revolutionary suicide’ by ingesting the lethal poison cyanide in 1978. In a heavily guarded room, those who refused were injected with the poison.
Another such group was the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, thought to be a religious group founded by Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibweteere in Uganda in 1989.
The group said it wanted to spread the word of Jesus Christ and to obey the Ten Commandments so as to avoid damnation in the apocalypse.
The leaders declared that the year 2000 would bring the apocalypse, and the group members sold off their belongings to prepare for the rapture. When on January 1, 2000 the world did not end, they announced another date for March 17, 2000 with a huge party in the town of Kanungu to celebrate the rapture. When members arrived for the end of the world party, the venue was engulfed in an explosion which killed 530 people in attendance. 395 people who did not die in the fire were poisoned, taking the total death toll from the cult’s massacre to 925.
Another American religious movement, Heaven’s Gate, equally ended in tragedy when its members were convinced to commit suicide.
The group’s followers believed they could transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings by ending their human nature and ascending to heaven on board an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO).
To prepare for death, co-founder Marshall Applewhite and his 38 followers took drugs and tied plastic bags over their heads to suffocate.
Yet another such religious group was the Branch Davidians, based in Waco, Texas. Its leader, David Koresh, had multiple wives and slept with under-age girls.
The group built a community called the Mount Carmel Centre, which served as the headquarters for the movement.
American security agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms besieged the centre to execute a search warrant on February 28, 1993, on suspicion that they stockpiled firearms, leading to a 51-day faceoff. A blaze was started at the centre that killed 70 members. Some of the Branch Davidians were found fatally shot by other members, while some died of suffocation and smoke inhalation. Koresh was found dead with a bullet wound in his forehead.
In Nigeria, one Chukwuemeka Ezeugo, founder of Christian Praying Assembly, is on death row for setting ablaze a worshipper at his church as punishment for fornication. During the trial of the man popularly known as Reverend King, witnesses spoke of his sordid practices like flogging and torturing members, seizing people’s wives, and sexual exploitation, among others. Even now, his deluded followers still celebrate him as some kind of hero.
The judge that sentenced Rev King described him and his likes as ‘religious highwaymen’ while Kenya’s President William Ruto called Nthenge a terrorist. We cannot agree more. No term is too low to tag them.
As a newspaper, we deplore the activities of wicked men like these who use the name of God to hoodwink their gullible followers and lead them to their deaths. We also warn followers to beware of those who propound strange and weird teachings that are at variance with the holy books.
We also urge the security agencies and the general public to be on the lookout for religious criminals who might commit such atrocities. A close study shows that they start by financial exploitation of members, followed by sexual exploitation and, finally, physical exploitation involving confinement, punishment, and isolation from family members. Once these are observed, security agents should be alerted.
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