After a five-month delay, the Reverend Mutava Musyimi led Taskforce formed to recommend more effective ways of regulating religious extremism submitted its report to President Ruto this week. While the Taskforce offers a way forward, the report offers few fresh perspectives.
Commissioned after the Shakahola mass crime a year ago, the 21-person Taskforce listened and read hundreds of testimonies and submissions as well as undertook bench-marking trips to Tanzania, Rwanda, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.
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.
Prior to the excavation of over 400 bodies and the search for 600 people who are 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. Several legal, policy and regulatory gaps are currently being exploited by religious leaders to avoid transparency and accountability to their followers, the public and the authorities. The Taskforce recommends a new law, an umbrella body and the formation of a religious affairs commission with the power to deregister religious organisations linked to religious extremism. The architecture is very similar to the NGO Coordination Act created to regulate NGOs in 1990. The Taskforce also seeks the amendment of the Kenya Information and Communication Act to regulate religious media content and the introduction of civic education to address cultic or occultist beliefs and practices.
More innovatively, the Taskforce calls for the full implementation of the Witness Protection Act and the swift enactment of the Whistle Blowers Bill currently with the Attorney General. I wondered whether this recommendation could be 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? It has been ten months after they were named in the October 2023 Senate Ad-hoc Committee report and then transferred to other duties? This and other Senate recommendations such as introducing new county security guidelines and pursuing Mackenzie’s international supporters have been ignored and deadlines have long passed.
The Taskforce also conveniently neglects how moral purism and intolerance has weaponized 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 the nation’s pulpits and minbars have become spaces to condemn others. Last year, religious leaders helped organize twelve public rallies that demonised sexual minorities and called for their beheading without a single religious leader publicly speaking against them, until the Mombasa High Court outlawed this in April this year.
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 when 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. Sensitive to this, let's tighten ways of preventing religious extremism to protect the public, but within our constitutional right to religious conscience. Let's also demand new ways of leading by the nation’s imams and priests. Without this, the Taskforce report might just be buried alongside the victims at Shakahola.
This opinion was also published in the Saturday Standard, 3 August 2024.
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