By ADX Team
Two years ago, Shakahola Forest erupted into a national nightmare of a doomsday cult’s deadly embrace, where self-anointed pastor Paul Mackenzie through his Good News International Ministry (GNIM) lured hundreds into starvation’s cold grip, promising rapture through empty stomachs.
Over 453 bodies were exhumed from shallow pits – emaciated children with eyes like hollow voids, mothers cradling ghostly infants and men reduced to brittle skeletons. Kenya recoiled, the world gasped, and vows echoed from corridors of power: “Never again.”
Yet, as the sun was setting on last month, those promises ring hollow. The horror has resurfaced, not as a ghost, but as a ravenous beast in Kwa Binzaro, a forsaken clearing just 30 kilometers away from Shakahola Kwa Mackenzie.
In Shakahola One, the Government did not just fail. It helped by standing aside, by dismissing pleas, by excusing themselves with fuel shortages and paperwork delays, by refusing to believe that Christian extremism could be deadly.
Now, again, fresh exhumations have unearthed a chilling sequel of bodies piled in makeshift tombs, scattered limbs gnawed by hyenas, 32 so far, with more graves lurking in the shadows.
It is Shakahola reborn, a macabre echo that screams of systemic rot in intelligence, police and administration, ignored warnings, and a country that learned nothing from its 453 confirmed dead in 2023.
The cycle spins with eerie familiarity, a dance of death enabled by authorities neglect and fanaticism. In July 2025, whispers from whistleblowers pierced the veil: cult remnants, undeterred by Mackenzie’s arrest, had regrouped in Kwa Binzaro’s thickets, resuming their fatal fasts under the guise of salvation.
Meet Francis Wanje, a tutor at Shanzu Teachers College in Mombasa, his face etched with the weary lines of unrelenting grief. He speaks in measured tones, but his eyes betray the storm within. He is a father who lost his daughter Emily and two grandsons to the cult’s danse macabre.
“The security forces played a major role in these deaths,” Wanje intones, his voice a blade wrapped in sorrow. “If they had acted early, my Emily would be alive today. Their delays killed our people.”
Flash back to March 17, 2023. Wanje stormed Malindi Police Station with his rescued grandson, the boy recounting tales of starvation in Shakahola’s depths. Officers escorted them to the forest’s edge, but retreated without a step inside. Weeks dragged on. Even Citizen TV’s exposé failed to ignite action.
“When I demanded exhumations for my grandsons, they chased me away,” Wanje recalls, bitterness sharpening his words. “Go collect them yourself, police told me.”
Only on April 14, after pleas to the County Commander and Commissioner, the spades finally bit the earth. By then, the forest had claimed dozens more.
All five of Stephen Mwiti’s children, including an infant, perished in Shakahola, taken into the forest by their mother, a devout disciple of GNIM, who believed they were going to “meet Jesus.” Mwiti, desperate to save them, had pleaded with police in Malindi and Langobaya to intervene. But his tears, his agony, and his warnings fell on deaf ears; the cold indifference of Kenya’s security officers sealed his children’s fate.
Close in Shakahola businessman Suleiman Osman watched strangers barricade grazing lands, claiming divine ownership. Beggars emerged from the forest to line-up on the Malindi-Tsavo road, skeletal and desperate. Alarmed, Osman and villagers alerted Langobaya Police Station, only to be brushed off like dust.
“We rallied youths and boda boda riders to probe deeper,” Osman recounts, his voice taut with frustration. “We encountered armed guards. We expected after that police would raid the forest. Instead, silence, inaction.”
Locals like Dickson Ngumbao, known as “Chafua,” and Simon Menza noted blocked paths, evicted charcoal burners and a fortress rising in the wilds. “That should have moved police to investigate,” Ngumbao fumes. “But no one cared.”
It fell to Victor Kaudo, director of the Malindi Human Rights Centre, to shatter the inertia. Tipped by GNIM defectors, he ventured in with journalists, rescuing a dying boy who happened to be Mzee Wanje’s grandson, who whispered of buried siblings. Even then, police dithered, citing fuel shortages for pathologists. When the floodgates finally burst, 453 bodies surfaced, a testament to fatal complacency.
A Senate ad hoc committee’s 2023 report laid bare the rot: Kilifi’s police and administrators knew of the cult since 2017 given mass relocations and radical sermons by GNIM, but buried the intel like the victims themselves.
Exhumation orders gathered dust. A rescue mission aborted after a cryptic phone call. Chiefs greased land deals for Mackenzie’s empire. The verdict? Not mere incompetence but complicity by neglect. Officers faced prosecution recommendations, yet accountability fizzled, leaving scars to fester.
Fast-forward to August 2025, and the nightmare loops. Binzaro’s discoveries mirror Shakahola’s playbook of ignored tips from locals spotting graves; delayed forensics amid bureaucratic snarls; the same forsaken ranch, once rubber-stamped for “religious use.”
Police spokesperson at the time of “Shakahola One”, Resila Onyango admitted failures citing intelligence gaps and coordination lapses, lessons from Shakahola One “not fully applied to prevent “Shakahola Two”.
Reading from the same script, the current spokerperson, Muchiri Nyaga says: “From Shakahola One we could have done better, especially from the lessons of Shakahola One.”
Mr Muchiri has gone on to admit a disconnect in collaboration among government agencies, including the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), local administration, and the community.
In 2023, the DCI confessed underestimating Christian extremism, deeming it benign next to Islamist threats like Al-Shabaab.
ADX investigation on the ground showed that officials shielded the cult and its leader and institutional.
The human toll defies statistics. Mzee Wanje haunts his days with guilt: “I watched my family wither while police idled.”
For Mwiti, his world ended with the killing of his children. He is now just a man, walking dead.
Now Kwa Binzaro repeats the agony. How many more?” Osman seethes with distrust: “We warned them twice. They ignored us.”
In courtrooms, Mackenzie’s and co. trial drags, fresh witnesses recounting horrors, bodies exhumed under his shadow, his denials a mocking echo. Kwa Binzaro’s suspects face scrutiny, but the hydra endures: remnants scatter, regroup, prey on the vulnerable.
As exhumations halt for autopsies, the forest exhales a warning breath. Shakahola should have been the last straw of a forest that taught Kenya the price of ignoring its own citizens. Instead, it has become a prologue to Kwa Binzaro.
Shakahola was no anomaly. It was a harbinger, exposing a state that dismisses pleas, excuses delays, and blinds itself to homegrown terror. The police and local administration didn’t just fail. They enabled, standing sentries over inaction. Now, with 32 bodies tallied and shadows deepening, the question burns: How many more must the forest claim before the nation awakens?