Kenya needs fresh ideas to tackle extreme religion and rogue clerics

After a five-month delay, the Reverend Mutava Musyimi-led Taskforce on effective ways of regulating religious extremism submitted its report to President William Ruto this week.

Disappointingly, the report offers little in fresh ideas. Commissioned after the Shakahola mass crime a year ago, the 21-person team listened and read hundreds of testimonies and submissions as well as benchmarking trips to Tanzania, Rwanda, the UK, and the US.

The report starts with the well-known legal position. Although the Constitution acknowledges the supremacy of God, Kenya is fundamentally a secular state.

Article 32 of the Constitution guarantees our right to individually or collectively practise a religion of our choice, and not be discriminated for doing so or not.

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Prior to the excavation of over 400 bodies and search for 600 people still missing, most Kenyans associated religious extremism with Islamic fundamentalism and the 1998, 2013, 2015 and 2019 Al-Shabaab attacks. Deeply steeped in Christian teachings, Shakahola was different, but equally as disturbing. The incident is also responsible for the same number of deaths as all the other attacks combined.

The main report finding was predictable. Kenya has several legal, policy and regulatory gaps currently being exploited by religious leaders to avoid transparency and accountability to their followers, public and authorities.

The Taskforce recommends a new law, an umbrella body and formation of a religious affairs commission with the power to deregister religious organisations linked to religious extremism. The architecture is similar to the NGO Coordination Act created to regulate NGOs in 1990.

The taskforce also seeks amendment of the Kenya Information and Communication Act to regulate religious media content and introduction of civic education to address cultic or occultist beliefs and practices.

More innovatively, the Taskforce calls for full implementation of the Witness Protection Act and swift enactment of the Whistle Blowers Bill currently with the Attorney General. I wonder whether this recommendation could have been pursued further. Religious cults operate like organised criminal gangs.

States have had success fighting organised crimes by tracking and confiscating profits, intensifying trans-national collaboration and arresting criminals caught bribing state officials with the intention of capturing the State.

Why hasn’t the state convicted or exonerated the eleven former Kilifi County security committee members accused of criminal negligence and active complicity, ten months after they were named in the October 2023 Senate Ad-hoc Committee report?

This and other Senate recommendations, such as new county security guidelines and pursuing Mackenzie’s global supporters have been ignored and deadlines have long passed.

The Taskforce also seems to have conveniently neglected how moral purism and intolerance has weaponised Scripture, the Tawrat and other religious texts against others based on their identity. Rather than, “love others as you wish to be loved”, too many of our pulpits and mini bars have become spaces to condemn others.

Last year, religious leaders helped organise 12 public rallies that called for beheading of sexual minorities without any religious leader publicly speaking against them, until Mombasa High Court outlawed this in April.

Failed by economic markets, disinformed by unregulated social media platforms and disappointed by corrupt leaders and ineffective state institutions, many citizens are easy victims for religious leaders spinning gospel prosperity and promise of material wealth. Increasingly distrustful, anti-factual and cocooned in little echo chambers, many have become easy prey for cults and cultish thinking.

The Taskforce report comes at a time religious groups face the worst harassment by the world’s governments in a decade. According to the Pew Research Centre, legal restrictions, discriminatory treatment and interference in the right to worship are at an all-time high.

We must tighten ways of preventing religious extremism to protect the public within our constitutional right to religious conscience. However, without new ways of leading by the nation’s imams and priests, this Taskforce report might as well be buried alongside the victims at Shakahola.