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Kenyan sect 'threat to stability'
03/07/2007 13:43 - (SA)
Nairobi - Kenya is trying to clamp down on a sect, the Mungiki, accused of occultist rituals and beheadings, but which is also seen as a threat to stability.
Analysts said the Mungiki was more of an organised criminal gang with political ties than a sect and they warn that such groups could multiply in the crime-prone country.
Police had stepped up the hunt for Mungiki members in recent days, killing several.
The gang was blamed for at least 40 murders since March, including 12 people who were beheaded. Police said they had killed at least 56 Mungiki members in the same period.
Extortion empire
Provincial chief criminal investigator Sebastian Ndaru said that seven suspected Mungiki were killed in the central Kangema area on Sunday as they took an oath, which included drinking blood.
The Mungiki, whose name came from word meaning "multitude" in the Kikuyu language, was accused of running an extortion empire in Nairobi and central Kenya.
There were no official numbers, but some estimates said there might be tens of thousands of members, mainly young unemployed men from the main Kikuyu tribe.
According to official figures, about 60% of Kenya's 33 million people lived on less than a dollar a day. Opinions are divided over the power of the Mungiki and how to deal with them.
Philip Murgor, a former director of public prosecution in Kenya, said: "If the intelligence gathering and crime detection were working, they could have been able to realise that Mungiki was transforming from a cultural, social organisation of unemployed persons, into an organised criminal gang, a mafia."
Drug dealing
But Mutuma Ruteere, dean of the Kenya Human Rights Institute, said: "Mungiki need to be seen in the context of the ... general failure of the state to provide security in the country, to provide hope to the youth."
The Mungiki began as a sect of dreadlocked, snuff-snorting youths inspired by the Mau Mau guerrillas who fought the British half a century ago, but are more often described now as violent slum vigilantes.
Ruteere said: "The older Mungiki was quite progressive, but the temptation of quick money made the Mungiki members abandon their earlier vision for changing society."
Many experts said the organisation was behaving like a mafia, extending its microbus businesses into drug dealing and other sectors.
But while its bloody tactics worry many people, much of the unease also came from the Mungiki's alleged links to senior politicians.
In the last months of his 24-year reign, President Daniel Arap Moi was thought to have loosened the leash on the Mungiki in exchange for their support for his heir Uhuru Kenyatta, a Kikuyu.
Analysts argued that some Mungiki factions felt aggrieved by their political allies and set the slums ablaze with terror.
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