Many Kenyans and the world, in general, are finding it hard to grasp how Paul Mackenzie was able to lure Kenyans into his deadly cult based at Shakahola Forest in Kilifi County.
Reports have shown that some of the best-learned minds in the country quit their professional careers to join Mackenzie’s church.
Once they joined, they were brainwashed into accepting to starve themselves to death with the promise of being welcomed to the pearl gates of Heaven by Jesus Christ.
Kenyans.co.ke went through years of Mackenzie’s teachings to know the tactic he used to brainwash his supporters.
Through the videos of his teachings, most of which are found on YouTube, it was evident that the pastor whom President William Ruto likened to a terrorist depended a lot on Kenyan and foreign media to scare his followers into submission.
He also, over the years, developed an obsession with events happening in Tanzania and its leaders.
It could be that he relied heavily on material coming from Tanzania because it was hard for his followers to independently verify the information.
Mackenzie had a favourite faithful by the name Mama Shinari from Tanzania whom he used to pass his supposed prophecies.
Mama Shinari would narrate a dream and then Mackenzie would find a recent happening in the country and claim it was a revelation of the dream.
For example, in 2020, Mama Shinari gave testimony at Mackenzie’s church about how she had received a dream from the pastor about a Tsunami engulfing Kenya.
Mackenzie would then replay clips of pandemic infections in the country and claim he had foreseen the events and that this was the Tsunami Mama Shinari was speaking about.
While prophecy usually foretells an event that is about to happen in the future, surprisingly, all Mackenzie’s prophecies sampled by Kenyans.co.ke were events that had already happened.
Mackenzie used media clips of tragic stories to scare his faithful of the end times.
He prophesied in 2020 that the world would end because of Covid-19 terming it as God’s anger toward the world.
Mackenzie particularly praised Tanzania under the late President Magufuli for not being strict in fighting the pandemic.
When Mackenzie saw that Kenya was winning the war against the pandemic, he revealed that the world would no longer be finished by the pandemic but by locusts.
Again, the Kenyan Government successfully dealt with the locust invasion and Mackenzie changed his prophesy yet again revealing that he had a vision that the cost of living would destroy the country.
He pulled a clip of Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu decrying the high cost of living and termed it as a sign of the end of times.
“This is just the start. Soon you will be seeing breaking news of superpower countries collapsing,” he terrified his followers while playing Samia’s clip on a loop.
To back his assertions that it was the end of times, Mackenzie also replayed Kenyan media clips reporting that Ruto’s Government would launch Unique Personal Identifier (UPI) for newborns.
“There is no unique number in the world except the biblical mark of the beast,” he told his followers urging them to fast to death and meet Jesus before the government rolled out the UPI.
The total number of bodies exhumed from the Shakahola Forest graves has since surpassed 58 by Monday, April 24, 2023.
