The implosion of Mungiki: Is this the beginning of the end?

Former Mungiki leader Maina Njenga was travelling on the Gilgil-Nyahururu road last Saturday when a hail of bullets hit the Subaru Forester carrying him at Ngirigacha, a small settlement 10 kilometres from Nyahururu town.

The Forester was sprayed with 25 bullets while a Toyota Premio said to be carrying Njenga’s security detail received nine.

Five people, including Njenga’s female companion and a bodyguard, were killed on the spot while the controversial former sect leader and now preacher at Hope International Ministries church in Kitengela escaped with gunshot wounds to his left arm and shoulder.

The events last Saturday were a culmination of two weeks of intrigues surrounding Maina Njenga and his followers.

Tempers have been simmering at Hope International for what insiders claim to be months now, but the last 14 days may prove to be the turning point for Njenga and his followers.

It all started on a Friday evening two weeks ago when herdsman Samwel Sayiore called it a day in the fields and started herding his goats towards his homestead on the flat plains north-east of Kitengela town.

He was halfway home when a strong, foul smell stopped him in his tracks.

The first thought in Sayiore’s mind was that one of his neighbours’ sheep had wandered off a few days back and fallen into one of the dozens of abandoned quarries on the grazing fields.

If that was the case, it would not be the first time; the numerous quarries here, dug up to feed Nairobi’s gluttonous demand for building stones, tend to flood with rainwater whenever the skies open.

And whenever that happens, some unfortunate sheep wanders off only to be found in one of the miniature dams; drowned.

Sayiore’s fear turned to panic when, just a few minutes after he began the search for the carcass of a neighbour’s sheep, he stumbled upon a human leg.

He did not know it, but at the moment he stumbled upon that leg, he had also stumbled upon a quiet revolution that has been brewing for several years now within Njenga’s movement; a revolution that is as ironic as it is tragic.

A few metres away, Sayiore found a human skull.

His heart threatening to burst out of his chest, the herdsman whipped out his mobile phone and fumbled over the buttons as he looked for the contacts of his location chief and someone at Kitengela Police Station.

An hour later, police officers arrived at the scene and started collecting the human body parts that were strewn over the grazing wasteland locally known as Sheep and Goat Farm.

When it got too dark to continue exploring the area, the police left to return the next morning, and that is when they found what appeared to be a shallow mass grave in an abandoned quarry.

Two human skulls were partially protruding from the ground and large rocks had been rolled over the patch to conceal a scandal that is rapidly turning out to be the biggest indicator that there is a slow yet growing implosion among Kitengela’s most controversial residents, who have since been warned to vacate the area.

Last week this newspaper learnt that some family members of those who were allegedly killed and secretly buried by suspected Mungiki gangs had started relocating to other towns out of fear that they too could be targeted next.

The families first reported to police about their missing relatives, then packed their belongings and left Kitengela to avoid, it is believed, the wrath of the murderous sect.

This interesting, if not bewildering, chapter of the Mungiki book, however, did not start yesterday; but on a sunny day in 2009 when a middle-aged man was dunked in water at the Jesus Is Alive Ministries headquarters on Haile Selassie Avenue, Nairobi.

The man wore a black T-shirt with the words “Jesus: That’s My Final Answer” emblazoned across the chest, and hundreds of young men, most of them in their 20s, followed him to the water, ready to be baptised, to shed their collective dark histories and start life afresh.

John Kamunya, alias Maina Njenga, the man in the black T-shirt, had in the few months preceding the spectacle above announced that he had divorced himself from the Mungiki gospel he had preached for years and converted to Christianity.

This was a public show of his Road-to-Damascus moment, a way of showing the Kenyans who had come to dread him and his followers that he had mended his ways.

Mungiki is an infamous militia group of young men, mostly aged between 18 and 40 and from the Kikuyu tribe, who came together in the 1980s and formed a movement that vowed to break away from the curse of colonialism and the brand of “Western brainwashing” called Christianity.

Modelled after the Mau Mau freedom fighters, the sect’s avowed mission was to mobilise Kenyans against this double-edged yoke of “mental and spiritual slavery”.

Multitude

The name Mungiki is derived from the Kikuyu word mûingî, which means masses or multitude, but is contextually translated to a united people.

Its members are united in the cause of preserving African roots, values and tradition and defending these from any interlopers, whether local or foreign.

That is why, on the day he was dipped into those calm waters at Jesus Is Alive, Maina Njenga did not simply switch organisations, he also walked straight into the camp of Mungiki’s core enemy —Christianity.

While many Kenyans had thought this would mark the end of the sect, it would later turn out that they were both right and wrong: they were right in thinking that the splitting of the group would lead to irrelevance and the eventual collapse of the sect, but they could never, in a million years, have predicted how many casualties this collapse would take with it.

The group, formed in the early 1990s and concentrating its activities in Murang’a and surrounding areas, shot to national prominence in mid ’90s when it extended its tentacles into Nairobi around 1994.

Members organised themselves into cells of 50 members each, and these were further grouped into five platoons strategically distributed throughout the city and its environs.

The group made a living from odd jobs such as rubbish collection, construction, and collecting fees from matatu operators and business owners, among other forms of “protection” racketeering.

The initial tremors under the otherwise firm Mungiki ground were felt in 2007, when rumours began spreading that the sect was splitting into two.

A staccato of dramatic murders of top sect leaders around the country soon followed.

Word on the street at the time was that most of these assassinations were carried out by the police in an attempt to compromise the group and weaken its unity, which had been grounded in a quasi-religious oath involving elaborate rituals.

The police denied any involvement in the assassinations.

Rumours of a split in the group were rubber-stamped two years later when Maina Njenga was released from prison — he had been jailed for illegal possession of a firearm — and, a few months later, declared that he had converted to Christianity.

It seems now that the hundreds of young men who followed him into the baptismal water, and out of Mungiki, had, with that single act, signed their own death warrants.

Death no big deal

The oath they had taken decreed at the end: “May I die if I desert or reveal our secrets.” Blasphemy, Mungiki believes, must be met with death. And death, to its adherents, is no big deal.

Condider this: back in the 1990s, the Mungiki became infamous for the cold-blooded nature of the hundreds of murders attributed to them.

The brutal killings that often involved the sawing off of people’s heads grabbed the country’s attention and simultaneously repelled it like a blood-curdling scene in a horror movie.

The scattered incidents became more frequent towards the end of the 20th century.

Then, in 2003, 31 people were brutally killed in Kariobangi, Nairobi, followed by another massacre of 22 in Nakuru.

The Nakuru episode stands out among many others because of the way it was carried out: suspected Mungiki youth invaded homes in Flamingo and Kimathi Estates, dragged people out of their houses and hacked them to death.

They did not negotiate, or warn, or preach; all they wanted to do was kill, which they achieved through all sorts of crude weapons, including pangas, axes and knives.

Images from the massacre stained the front pages of Kenya’s newspapers like a bad habit that would not go away for days.

Public outrage led the police, for the first time, to take a more decisive action against the group and many of the its members were killed in the months that followed.

A series of events led to the arrest of Maina Njenga in 2007 after he was found in possession of a gun and five kilogrammes of marijuana.

While police connected him to a series of murders, the courts ruled that there was not enough evidence to link the man with the crimes and the murder charges against him were withdrawn.

While he had been sentenced to five years in Kamiti, he only spent two years in the cooler.

Then all went quiet in the Mungiki ranks — until the Maasai herdsman stumbled upon the leg of a human being in the plains of Kitengela two weeks ago.

So, what is happening? Is the group regrouping, or has it all along been fooling Kenyans?

The answers to those questions lie, not in Njenga’s Hope International church, but in the sect’s insatiable thirst for land. Wherever Whenever.

In the more than two decades that the group has existed, its leaders and representatives have expressed bitterness over the rich and elite in society grabbing and hoarding land that should otherwise have belonged to the community.

Colonial injustices

The group traces this grievance back to the colonial times, when, according to them, the land previously owned by British settlers was simply transferred to corrupt government officials instead of back to the communities it was stolen from.

Little wonder, then, that the recent spates of killings have been reported to be over land.

Before the fallout several years ago, the members of Mungiki had elaborately organised themselves into financial groups and associations.

Money collected through various extortion rackets was pooled and used to purchase pieces of land in different parts of the country.

The Kitengela land for which blood is now being shed previously belonged to East Africa Portland Cement Company (EAPCC) but was bought by an association of former Mungiki members.

Some of those we talked to last week, and who sought anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said members registered with Sh5,000 and made a down payment of Sh20,000 each for acquiring the land. About 600 people bought into the idea, with most of them contributing more than 60,000 for the venture.

While not every Mungiki member contributed for the purchase of the land, it turns out everyone wanted in.

Those who did not pay a dime claimed that the land was bought through the group’s savings, and that it thus belonged to them as well.

And then the fighting began. Once they were united in their fight for land, but once they got a little of it, the land divided and started killing them.

Yes, the Mungiki are still killing, but they are killing each other.

Their bleeding is internal.

The police no longer need to carry out the extra-judicial killings they were accused of at the turn of the millennium; all they need to do is stand back and watch as former friends and “blood-brothers” destroy each other, then step in to collect the bodies.