Kenya Let Paul Mackenzie Walk Free Twice. Then 191 People Starved.

A man told children to stop eating. Then he watched them die, and he smiled.

On a Friday in Mombasa, a Kenyan judge sentenced Paul Mackenzie to 200 years in prison for the murder of 190 children and one adult. Justice Diana Kavedza split the term into two blocks of 100 years, one for murder by starvation and one for direct homicide. Twenty-eight accomplices, convicted alongside him the month before, received their own terms. Outside the courthouse, Mackenzie walked into a tent wearing a grey polo shirt and black trousers and smiled. He had told the court he never forced anyone to starve. The court did not believe him, and neither should we.

Let us be precise about what happened, because the details are the indictment. Mackenzie, a self-proclaimed pastor, ran a group under the name Good News International Church. He preached a Christian doomsday message: the world was ending, and the faithful had to starve themselves and their children to reach heaven and "meet Jesus." The followers who resisted were threatened and beaten by his accomplices. The victims were buried in the Shakahola Forest near the coast in southeastern Kenya. When investigators finally went in, they found emaciated bodies in shallow graves and dumped in latrines. Some had been buried alive. Kenyan authorities say more than 400 people died in the Shakahola tragedy, which makes it one of the deadliest cult-related disasters in the country's history.

Now sit with that. Children, some of them infants, were starved in a forest while adults who should have protected them held them down, withheld food, and dug the graves. This was not a fringe belief that spiraled out of control in some distant village. It was a systematic killing campaign conducted in plain sight, over weeks, in a country whose security services have the reach to track dissidents, monitor opposition rallies, and raid newsrooms when it chooses to.

And here is the question that should keep every Kenyan awake tonight. Paul Mackenzie had been arrested twice before. Twice he was taken into custody, and twice he was released. Each time the state had the opportunity to stop him, and each time it chose not to. How many children were still alive in that forest after the first arrest? How many more were buried after the second? Those are not abstract questions. They are the difference between a tragedy and a crime of institutional negligence.

Police only moved in 2023, after a tip-off reached them. The bodies that followed were not a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention to Mackenzie's movements. They were a surprise only to those who had decided not to look. The Shakahola case exposed a government that treats religious organizations as untouchable, that registers churches with little scrutiny, and that does not connect the dots when a man with a long record of troubles gathers hundreds of followers in a remote forest. Kenya's constitution guarantees freedom of religion. It does not guarantee freedom to starve children to death under a religious banner, and no honest reading of the law would suggest otherwise.

Kenya is not alone in this failure, and we should be honest about the pattern. Uganda's Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God killed more than 700 people in 2000 in a fire and mass murder that shocked the country and the world. In 1978, the Jonestown massacre in Guyana claimed more than 900 lives when an American cult leader ordered his followers to drink poison. These are not African stories alone. But in every case the common thread is a charismatic leader, a captive congregation, and a state that either looked away or lacked the institutional capacity to act. Our continent has been paying the price for weak institutions for generations. Religious extremism thrives in the gaps where the rule of law is absent or selectively enforced.

The solutions are not mysterious. They are the building blocks of any functioning democracy, and they are within reach. First, Kenya must establish a transparent, independent regulatory framework for religious organizations. Registration should require verifiable governance, financial disclosure, and clear accountability for leaders. A church that claims to be a place of worship but operates a closed compound with children inside should trigger an automatic welfare inquiry, not a shrug. Second, police and prosecutors must be held answerable for ignoring warnings. When a suspect is arrested twice and released twice, there must be a public inquiry into why. Officers who ignored credible reports should face discipline, and the findings should be published.

Third, child protection must not depend on the goodwill of whoever runs the local church. Social welfare officers need legal authority and funding to enter compounds where children are at risk, and courts must treat child starvation under any ideology as a serious crime. Fourth, Kenya should look to its own institutions as proof that accountability can work. The Mombasa court delivered a verdict that the evidence demanded. Independent courts, a free press, and an active civil society are exactly what made this prosecution possible. Those same forces must now be strengthened, not weakened, by the next wave of security-driven laws.

Look at what works elsewhere on the continent. Botswana built its prosperity on predictable institutions, property rights, and a government that answers to its citizens. Mauritius has shown that a small island nation can maintain a strong rule of law and a stable democracy when its institutions are respected. Senegal has demonstrated that peaceful transfers of power are possible even under intense pressure. None of these countries is perfect. All of them understood that a state's first duty is to protect its people, and that protection means enforcing the law equally, including against men who wear clerical collars.

So what must we demand? We must demand a full public inquiry into the Shakahola case, with a timeline of every police report, every arrest, every release, and every decision not to act. We must demand a religious regulation law that protects worship and prevents exploitation, drafted with input from independent experts rather than rushed through in response to headlines. We must demand that child welfare be treated as non-negotiable, with trained officers, adequate budgets, and legal power to intervene. And we must demand that the government stop treating accountability as an embarrassment to be managed rather than a duty to be performed.

Paul Mackenzie will spend the rest of his life in a cell. The 191 children and adults who starved in Shakahola will not come back, and no sentence can undo what was done to them. But the sentence is only the end of the first chapter. The real test is whether Kenya's institutions learn from this horror or simply congratulate themselves for finally acting. Mothers across this country are asking what kind of state lets a man walk free after being arrested twice. They deserve a real answer, and we deserve leaders who give it.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA