Bhang-smoking cult recruiting young people in Central region

Security officers in the Central region are investigating claims that an emergent religion is clandestinely recruiting young people into a bhang-smoking lifestyle. 

Said to have its roots in the United States, the faith has assumed the name International Church of Cannabis. Sub-county security committees have been mobilised to dismantle it. 

Central Region Commissioner Wilfred Nyagwanga said the activities of the "strange faith" are to blame for a sudden rise in the bhang trade and smoking.

“We will not allow any activity, whether camouflaged as a faith that is hell-bent to waste our youths. We have some Western cultures that are creeping into our society and we will apply our laws as they are and give no room to such infiltration of corrupt morals,” he said.

“We have also noted that there are too many cases of foreign nationals being arrested in the Central region dealing in bhang where they brainwash our youths that bhang smoking is a religion and also medicinal.”

Rift Valley Commissioner George Natembeya, who served in Murang’a County between 2007 to 2012, told the Nation that the bhang network is a problematic phenomenon in many regions but its tentacles are stronger in counties that have purchasing power.

“The problem is that the society hosts these networks without sharing information with the security…yes, sometimes we have one or two officers conspiring with the criminals but as always, the government will win the war,” he said.

Kirinyaga County Commissioner Jim Njoka told the Nation that “we are aware of that scheme... we have arrested eight members of such organised group and we are in an all-out war with the cartels and soon we will win.”

Bhang-smoking zone

Mr Njoka said Kirinyaga will not be transformed into a bhang-smoking zone in the name of religion.
Sports Chief Administrative Secretary Zack Kinuthia told the Nation that he had noted the menace when he was in the ministry of Education in the same capacity.

“It came to our attention that there was a movement that was using bhang as a symbol of faith. We had the promoters of this faith recruiting followers even in our schools,” he said.

“In an incident in Maragua town in February a kingpin of the faith called Macharia Makura was arrested after it emerged that he was the contact person in the faith in Murang’a South.”

Mr Kinuthia said the network is active in many parts of the Central region, including Kiambu, Murang’a, Kirinyaga, Nyandarua and Nyeri counties.

Nyandarua County chairman of Anti-Alcoholic and Narcotics Board Joseph Kaguthi told the Nation that the religion is recruiting members and binding them to loyalty through bhang-smoking oaths. 

"The recruiting agents are all over and in essence they are nothing else but crooked peddlers. They are after market mobilisation for cash, not promoters of any well-meaning drive. In fact, one word for them is criminals."

Mr Kinuthia said there is nothing in the faith but an empty drive whose narrative is promoted by bhang dealers “who in some instances have the protection of some of our security officers and its aim is to create an elastic market for bhang and other narcotics”.

Cannabis activism cult

He said the movement is connected with various attempts to “push the agenda of legalisng bhang in the country — attempts that have increased in the recent past”.

The movement, he said, is controlled from behind the scenes by foreigners who work with local unscrupulous traders, corrupt officers and morally corrupt actors in the social set-up who give it the conducive environment needed to operate.”

Mr Kinuthia decried the rising number of teens being indoctrinated into the cannabis activism cult that teaches them doctrine of “the light, Canaan, Cannabis and God Almighty.”

In Kigumo sub-county, police boss Michael Ndegwa told the Nation that he chanced upon this movement in a case where two brothers were arrested last month accused of murdering their neighbour.

“The two had earlier left their mother’s house where she was with her two other children aged 1.3 and 3 years and announced that they were burning them alive as god had directed them,” he said.

“They said their god had directed them to kill themselves together with their mother and two siblings. They had machetes and a jerry can of petrol and were in the process of executing that evil plan when a neighbor intervened.”

The two, residents of Gakoei-ini village, are accused of killing Chege Mwangi by beheading him. The duo, he said, had told their mother that they had joined an Indiana-based faith called International Church of Cannabis.

The boys said they had been recruited into the faith by a Nyanza-based ‘spiritual leader’ who had visited the area advocating for the legalisation of cannabis as a holy herb.

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