The maize and beans were not an afterthought. They were part of the cover-up.
When Paul Mackenzie ordered his followers to plant crops over shallow graves in Shakahola forest, he was not simply concealing the bodies of people who had died under his religious commands. He was concealing evidence of a crime that, by the time the first graves were discovered, the Kenyan State had already had several opportunities to prevent.
The crops were intended to hide the dead. But the more disturbing question is why a man could organise a sprawling settlement, impose a regime of starvation, oversee the burial of hundreds of people and maintain an elaborate system of coercion without the institutions mandated to protect life stopping him.
Shakahola was not simply a case of a religious extremist deceiving vulnerable followers. It was also a catastrophic failure of public administration, policing, intelligence gathering, child protection and political accountability.
More than 400 bodies have been exhumed from the red soil of Kilifi County since April 2023. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights put the death toll at 429. Autopsies established that 214 people died from starvation and 39 from asphyxia, providing forensic confirmation of the systematic violence inflicted on the followers.
Hundreds of lives were lost, many of them children. Yet only a fraction of the victims have been positively identified through DNA testing. As of September 2026, only 14 of the 443 bodies held at Malindi Sub County Hospital had been claimed by relatives.
These figures tell the story of a massacre. But they also tell the story of a State that failed before the deaths, struggled to account for the dead afterwards and has yet to establish meaningful accountability for those whose public responsibilities included preventing such a catastrophe.
A known extremist, an unprotected population
Mackenzie was not an unknown figure who suddenly emerged from the forest in 2023.
A former Nairobi taxi driver, he established Good News International (GNI) Ministries in Malindi in 2003. His teachings rejected formal education, modern medicine and vaccination. He described the Huduma Namba digital identity card as the mark of the beast and encouraged followers to burn their birth certificates and identity documents.
His preaching was openly hostile to Western institutions, the United States, the United Nations and even the Catholic Church.
Through a network of church branches and broadcasts on Times TV, Mackenzie attracted thousands of followers across Kenya. He reportedly persuaded some that he could communicate directly with God. Some followers sold property and surrendered their resources to the church.
His activities were not entirely outside the State’s field of vision. Authorities began scrutinising his establishment in the late 2010s. His church and television station were shut down in 2019.
But shutting down an institution was not the same as dismantling the network, investigating the dangers posed by its leadership or protecting the people already under its influence.
Mackenzie simply relocated.
He moved to Shakahola forest, approximately 70 kilometres from Malindi, where, according to court testimony, he acquired 480 acres and subdivided the land into settlements bearing biblical names: Galilee, Judea, Samaria, Bethlehem, Tiro and Sukari.
What emerged was effectively a parallel administration operating beyond meaningful public oversight.
Mackenzie established a rigid command structure involving guards, overseers, grave diggers and cooks. He exercised control over the daily lives of residents, restricting their movements, prohibiting congregants from helping one another and requiring his personal clearance for movement beyond Bawa Hola.
The question that should haunt the State is how such an arrangement could develop and persist without attracting effective intervention from the local administration, police, intelligence services and other agencies responsible for public safety.
Children abandoned by the State before they were killed
The Shakahola tragedy was also a prolonged assault on children’s rights.
The indoctrination that preceded the massacre was not confined to the forest. It was taking place in homes, churches and communities across the country.
A 15-year-old witness, identified as PW40, testified that he followed Mackenzie’s television preaching with his brothers, uncle and aunts before attending a GNI branch in Vihiga. They were taught not to attend school or seek hospital treatment. Mackenzie also preached against childhood vaccination and obtaining Huduma Namba.
Another protected witness, PW52, testified that in 2016, while she was in Standard Four, her mother travelled to Meru, withdrew her from school and declared formal education sinful. Her schoolbooks and uniform were burnt, effectively ending her education.
These were not merely matters of religious disagreement. They were warning signs of children being systematically deprived of fundamental rights.
The Constitution guarantees every child the right to education, healthcare, nutrition and protection from abuse, neglect and harmful cultural practices. The Children’s Act also establishes obligations for protecting children from exploitation and neglect.
Yet the system that should have identified children being withdrawn from school, denied medical treatment and subjected to extremist indoctrination did not prevent the progression of these abuses into mass death.
This is one of the most damning dimensions of Shakahola: Children were failed long before they were starved.
The warning signs existed in multiple jurisdictions and at multiple levels of government. But the systems responsible for identifying vulnerable children and intervening in situations of abuse did not provide the protection they were designed to guarantee.
A killing operation conducted in plain sight
The Mombasa trial, in which Mackenzie and his co-accused were convicted in connection with the murders of 191 people, including 190 children, exposed the extraordinary degree of organisation behind the deaths.
Justice Diana Kavedza’s findings described a deliberate programme of starvation in which Mackenzie directed his followers to fast to death so that they could meet Jesus.
The order of death was chillingly systematic: Children first, followed by unmarried people, the elderly, women and finally men. Mackenzie’s own children would follow, then his wife, before he completed the fast and went to heaven.
This was not a spontaneous outbreak of religious hysteria. It was a coordinated system of coercion, surveillance and killing.
PW8, a protected witness, described an administrative hierarchy comprising Mackenzie and several lieutenants, including Smart, Steve, Evans Siria, Michael and Isika.
Following the death of a congregant named Ray, Mackenzie issued a decree directing followers to undertake an absolute dry fast, without food or water, until death.
Armed guards, including Smart, Mark and Titus, were deployed to secure exits, prevent escapes and conceal deaths from law enforcement.
The enforcement was brutal.
PW8 testified that enforcers confiscated food stored at her homestead. She was forced to deny her six children food and water, watching them die one after another, beginning with her three-year-old sixth-born child and ending with her 17-year-old first-born.
Her husband was separated from the family and assigned to transport and bury bodies in shallow graves, with the burials euphemistically described as weddings.
A 15-year-old witness identified as GN described makeshift fasting rooms, or fasting bays, covered in black plastic sheeting to trap heat and accelerate dehydration.
He testified that he was beaten by a man identified as Evans and described security personnel patrolling the forest, intercepting escape attempts and relaying information about police presence to Mackenzie.
After 11 days without food, GN and a friend attempted to escape. They were captured and returned to Mackenzie’s residence. Eventually, he and his brother managed to send a plea for help to a local herder, who alerted the authorities.
That a child had to rely on a chance encounter with a herder to escape a death sentence in a settlement where authorities had previously received complaints speaks volumes about the failure of the State’s protective structures.
Enos Amanya Ngala, who later became a State witness after entering a plea bargain, described an enforcement system in which teams guarded water sources, farms, adult men and the forest perimeter.
He served as a grave digger and security operative, working in shifts and planting crops over graves to conceal the bodies.
He also testified that Mackenzie presided over burial ceremonies, including that of his own daughter, Snyder, whose body was later exhumed and moved to another village.
Amanya lost four other children. Their burials were conducted without his presence, and his wife later confirmed their deaths.
Even the families of those enforcing Mackenzie’s orders were not spared.
The language used to sustain the system was itself an instrument of control. Deaths became weddings. Fasting was described as kupanda mlima, or climbing the mountain. Breaking the fast was kushuka mlima, descending the mountain.
Mackenzie prohibited crying and expressions of grief during burials, presenting the dead as spiritual heroes and warning that the Ark was about to close.
The cruelty was deliberate. The organisation was sophisticated. The victims were trapped.
But the question remains: Where was the State?
The warnings were there. The institutions were not.
The most consequential evidence in the Shakahola story may not be the testimony describing how people died. It may be the evidence showing how many opportunities the authorities had to stop the deaths.
Mackenzie had been on the radar of law enforcement since at least 2017, when police raided his compound and rescued children. He faced legal proceedings, but there was no lasting intervention capable of dismantling his operations.
In 2019, his church and television station were shut down. He moved to Shakahola.
Complaints about his teachings, particularly his opposition to education and medical treatment, continued. Reports of people being held against their will also reached local authorities.
Yet the State’s response was largely to summon and warn him.
The Senate Ad Hoc Committee on the Proliferation of Religious Organisations heard testimony that exposed how deeply the failure extended into grassroots administration and security.
Former members of Nyumba Kumi committees told senators that information about deaths and suspicious activities in Shakahola was available at the village level.
Dr Salim Ndemo testified that information was known locally but was either ignored or met with deliberate inaction.
Nyumba Kumi was established precisely to bridge the gap between communities and the formal security apparatus. It was intended to ensure that suspicious activities, emerging threats and security concerns did not remain invisible until they became national emergencies.
The system had built 387,000 clusters nationally before being dismantled.
The Senate report found that local police had received repeated complaints from religious leaders and community members about Mackenzie’s teachings, his opposition to schooling and medical treatment, and allegations that people were being held hostage.
The response was to summon and warn him.
In March 2023, following the deaths of two children, Mackenzie was arrested and released on Ksh10,000 bail. According to the parliamentary inquiry, his starvation directives intensified after his release.
This raises fundamental questions about policing, prosecutorial decision-making, judicial oversight and the capacity of the State to respond to credible warnings of imminent harm.
Why were the complaints not treated as evidence of a developing humanitarian and criminal emergency? Why did the authorities not conduct sustained surveillance and inspections? Why were children and other vulnerable people not removed from immediate danger? Why did the closure of Mackenzie’s church not trigger more comprehensive monitoring of his activities?
And perhaps most importantly, who was responsible for ensuring that the warnings were acted upon?
The failure was not simply that one police officer did not act or that one administrator missed a report. It was a breakdown across an interconnected system whose purpose was to prevent precisely this kind of tragedy.
The State knew: A child’s testimony makes the failure personal
Perhaps the most disturbing evidence of institutional failure came from the testimony of PW6.
The young witness recounted that after escaping Shakahola for the first time, he reported the suffering of children to a village elder and the chief.
The chief gave him Ksh1,000 for transport.
But the child had nowhere else to go. He eventually returned to Shakahola.
Instead of receiving sustained protection, he was whipped by his father and taken to Mackenzie’s house, where he was interrogated and beaten over his departure.
Consider what this means.
A child escaped a settlement where children were being starved. He reported the suffering to representatives of the State. He was given money for transport but apparently no effective protection, safe accommodation or intervention to ensure his safety.
He returned to the very environment from which he had fled.
The chief and village elder were not abstract government officials operating from distant offices. They were the State’s presence at the grassroots.
Their mandate was to identify danger, protect vulnerable people and report matters requiring intervention.
The child’s testimony illustrates the devastating gap between having public institutions on paper and having institutions that actually protect people.
It is difficult to imagine a more direct indictment of the State’s failure to protect children.
After the massacre, another institutional failure
The State’s difficulties did not end with the discovery of the graves.
The identification and return of victims’ remains have exposed further weaknesses in forensic capacity, public communication and the administration of justice for bereaved families.
In March 2025, the Government Chemist reported that 333 DNA samples had been tested from 453 recovered bodies. Many profiles could not be matched because relatives had not supplied comparison samples.
Officials also cited the cost and availability of PCR testing kits.
The forensic directorate explained that the Shakahola remains had been buried in soil containing substantial quantities of humic acid, which accelerated DNA degradation. The sheer number of bodies made the identification exercise exceptionally difficult.
PCR testing was required, but the necessary testing capacity was not available locally, and outsourcing was prohibitively expensive. One kit capable of carrying out 200 rounds cost almost Ksh1 million.
The consequences are profound.
Families who lost children, parents, siblings and spouses have been left without the certainty that comes with identifying and laying their loved ones to rest.
In September 2026, the Kilifi County government gave families 21 days to identify and collect the 443 bodies still held at Malindi Sub County Hospital.
Only 14 had been identified.
Some families had been traced but declined to collect the remains because of the stigma associated with the massacre.
The reliance on a Gazette notice to reach families also attracted criticism. Senator William Kisang questioned the approach, observing that many people do not read the Gazette and that public announcements through television and other media would have been more effective.
The problem is bigger than a communication exercise.
How does a country recover from a mass atrocity when its institutions cannot adequately identify the victims? What does justice mean to a mother who knows her child died in Shakahola but cannot establish which of the recovered bodies belongs to her?
The families are victims of the original crime, but they are also confronting a prolonged administrative and forensic struggle to establish the identities of the dead.
The State’s obligation to them did not end when the bodies were exhumed.
Mackenzie is sentenced. Who will answer for the State?
On November 6, 2026, Justice Diana Kavedza sentenced Mackenzie to 200 years in prison: 100 years for 183 counts of murder by starvation and another 100 years for eight counts of murder by direct homicide, to run consecutively.
Twenty-six co-convicts received sentences ranging from 100 to 160 years.
The judge made an important observation from the bench: Religious freedom must never become a shield for criminality, coercion and the systematic violation of human rights.
She also acknowledged that Kenyan institutions had failed and called on Parliament to take measures to prevent a recurrence.
The convictions are significant. They establish criminal responsibility for the people who organised, facilitated and executed the killings.
But they do not resolve the central question of institutional accountability.
Indeed, the judgment itself raised questions that the criminal trial could not answer: How could so many people gather and remain in such circumstances without effective intervention by local security structures, regional security teams or the National Intelligence Service?
Where were the chiefs, police officers, intelligence officers and other public authorities whose responsibilities included detecting danger and protecting life?
These questions cannot be answered by sentencing Mackenzie to two centuries in prison.
They require investigations into the conduct of public officers, a clear account of what information reached which offices, when it was received, what action was taken and who made the decisions that allowed the situation to continue.
So far, no local administrator, police commander or intelligence officer has faced a public trial for failing to act on the years of warnings.
In 2023, President William Ruto apologised, acknowledging that there had been ‘laxity from our part as government’ and promising that heads would roll.
They have not.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission welcomed the convictions but also emphasised the responsibility of local administrators, police officers, intelligence personnel and religious leaders.
The Senate Ad Hoc Committee had recommended a Religious Organisations Bill and called for the Interior Cabinet Secretary to formulate guidelines establishing criteria for identifying harmful religious doctrines and procedures for county security committees to monitor and act on intelligence reports within 90 days.
Those recommendations were an acknowledgment that the problem was systemic.
Yet the proposed legislative and administrative reforms have not been fully translated into a publicly demonstrated accountability framework capable of guaranteeing that such a failure will not recur.
The danger is that Shakahola will become another Kenyan tragedy in which individual perpetrators are punished while institutional responsibility dissolves into committees, recommendations, apologies and promises of reform.
The State cannot prosecute its way out of accountability
There is an important distinction between the criminal responsibility of Mackenzie and his accomplices and the public responsibility of the State.
Mackenzie ordered the killings. His followers enforced the starvation regime. His associates guarded the forest, prevented escapes and buried the dead.
They must answer for those crimes.
But the State had a different responsibility: To prevent people from being subjected to such treatment in the first place.
That responsibility was not optional. It flowed from the Constitution, the law and the mandates of public institutions.
The right to life, the right to education, the right to healthcare and the rights of children are not abstract constitutional declarations. They impose obligations on the government and the institutions through which it exercises authority.
The Shakahola massacre exposed the gap between those constitutional promises and the lived reality of people who were effectively abandoned by the institutions meant to protect them.
It also exposed a particularly dangerous weakness in the country’s governance architecture: The tendency to treat warnings as isolated incidents rather than pieces of intelligence that, when considered together, reveal an emerging threat.
A religious leader who rejects education and medicine, withdraws children from school, burns identity documents, attracts vulnerable followers, establishes an isolated settlement, restricts movement and faces repeated complaints of coercion should not be treated as an ordinary religious figure whose activities require occasional warnings.
Such circumstances demand coordinated intervention.
The failure to recognise that danger, or to act on it, requires an accounting that goes beyond the people already convicted.
There must be an independent examination of the conduct of the relevant police officers, chiefs, county security committees, intelligence officials, prosecutors and other public authorities. Where evidence establishes criminal negligence, abuse of office, deliberate obstruction or other offences, the responsible individuals should face the consequences provided by law.
Administrative responsibility must also be established. Public officers cannot simply move on from failures of this magnitude because the criminal proceedings against the principal perpetrators have concluded.
And Parliament must move beyond expressions of outrage to enact effective safeguards that protect freedom of religion without allowing religious authority to become a licence for abuse.
The graves have been opened. The questions remain buried.
The maize and beans Mackenzie ordered planted over the shallow graves have long since grown and withered.
The bodies beneath them have been exhumed, numbered, photographed and placed in refrigerated storage outside Malindi Sub County Hospital. They remain in black bags, identified by handwritten cards, awaiting families who may never come forward or may never be able to establish which remains belong to their loved ones.
Mackenzie is in prison, serving a sentence of 200 years for the murders he ordered.
But the officials who received complaints, the security officers who summoned and warned him, the authorities who failed to protect children, and the institutions that possessed the mandate and information to intervene have not been subjected to a comparable process of public accountability.
President Ruto’s promise that heads would roll remains an unfinished undertaking.
The question is no longer whether the State failed. The trial judge has acknowledged institutional failure. Parliamentary investigations documented warnings that went unheeded. Witnesses described seeking help from government representatives and returning to the very environment in which they were being abused.
The question is whether Kenya is prepared to identify the people responsible for that failure and make them answer.
The families of Shakahola are still waiting. They are waiting for DNA results, for the identification of remains, for the dignity of burying their loved ones and for answers about how their relatives were allowed to disappear into a forest where a death cult operated for years.
They are also waiting for justice beyond the courtroom sentences handed to Mackenzie and his accomplices.
They deserve to know who received the warnings, who ignored them, who failed to act and why.
The tragedy of Shakahola is not simply that a religious extremist managed to convince hundreds of people to die in the name of God.
It is that the Kenyan State, with its chiefs, police officers, intelligence services, child protection systems and constitutional obligations, failed to stop him.
Mackenzie and his accomplices have been sentenced. But the State has not yet answered for its part in the tragedy.
Until the officials responsible for protecting those people are made to account, until the institutional failures are confronted and the families receive the answers they deserve, Shakahola will remain an unfinished story of justice.
The killers have been punished. The question of who failed to protect the victims remains open.