‘I could no longer recognise my family after they joined Paul Mackenzie's cult’

Roseline Asena first heard of the Good News International church in 2017, through her younger brother’s wife, who together with her husband lived in Mombasa at the time.

The church is currently trending after not-so-good news emerged revealing that it might actually be a 20-year-old cult. In the latest developments, its leader, the controversial pastor Paul Mackenzie Nthenge, reportedly told followers to starve themselves in order to “meet Jesus”. 

Fifty-eight people have been confirmed dead, with more bodies expected to be exhumed as a search operation continues in the Shakahola area of Kilifi County.

“It was through my brother’s wife, who told me how her husband had finally quit alcohol and we were very happy for them because they could now focus on raising their family,” Asena told Citizen TV’s Nimrod Taabu in a Monday interview on the Sema Na Citizen program.

But in 2019, she said, it reached a point her brother said their child was not supposed to go to school. The couple had by now relocated to Malindi.

At that point also, his wife was pregnant with their second-born but had not gone to a clinic because the church was against it.

“He became a different person I could not recognise because all along we had grown up going to the hospital… I tried to talk it out with him but it would end up in a quarrel,” she said.

Ms Asena’s brother then spread the ‘good news’ to their younger sister, who accepted and joined the church. She even started preaching.

“During phone calls, she started insisting on preaching to you, but I just let her do it because I thought it did not affect me,” Asena said.

The preaching, according to Asena, was laced with warnings about the end of the world. “It was all about Jesus' coming and how we might not see the next year,” she said.

And in a few months, she, too, started barring her children from going to school.

Asena recalls that in March 2020 when then-President Uhuru Kenyatta ordered the closure of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Good News International used the opportunity to recruit more members.

“They were telling people, ‘Can you see schools are finally closed? This is just the start of the beginning of the end of the world.”

Asked how she did not end up in the cult, she said her brother, sister and sister-in-law tried to get her to join their church by sending her people to her home but she turned the down.

“These are my younger siblings, honestly, they are not going to advise me on some of these things which I have a hard time believing,” she said.

So far, police say they have arrested fourteen members of the cult, two of whom Asena says are her brother and his wife. She saw them on television after they were captured.

She said the family's only hope is that the couple’s children are fine.

“I am going to Malindi to look for his five children, we do not know. Our hope and prayer are that we find out that they left them out of this and that they are in a safe place.”

29 rescued alive

Families of the church’s believers who are still missing continued to throng the Malindi police station over the weekend with the hopes of sighting their loved ones, while police combed through the Shakahola area that has been cordoned off in the wake of the operation.

Citizen TV reporters spoke to some who said they had come from as far as Nyanza and Western regions, and who had been there since the shocking news started unravelling last week.

As of Monday morning, detectives had yet to dig up more than 50 graves.

In the afternoon, Inspector-General of Police Japhet Koome told reporters that 29 people had been rescued alive.

Nthenge was charged last month after two kids died of starvation while in their parents' care and he is in custody.