Non-Subscriber ExtractSect in the city - Criminal group seeks to expand in Kenya |
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By Duncan Woodside
04 February 2010
Maina Njenga, the leader of Mungiki gang, is greeted by hundreds of people as he leaves a church in Nairobi on 23 October 2009. He has harboured political ambitions beyond his control of the Mungiki. (Press Association)
The Mungiki is a largely clandestine, cult-like organisation. It emerged in the late 1980s as a mass youth movement designed to protect and promote the interests of the Kikuyu ethnic group (which accounts for 22 per cent of Kenya's population) against the activities of the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) party's youth wing. The powerbase of then-president Daniel Arap Moi's KANU party was centred in the Rift Valley, where Kikuyus were repeatedly forced out of their homes in the late 1980s by land and property-grabbing initiatives. To fund its activities (and provide employment for youths), one of the Mungiki's earliest business activities was growing vegetables in rural areas on land owned by senior personnel and transporting produce for sale in markets in major towns.
In a major business breakthrough in the 1990s, the Mungiki gained a foothold in the transport industry in the Rift Valley and for a time appeared to be establishing itself as an officially legitimate organisation, especially after Moi, in an move apparently designed to carve out a new electoral constituency, gave his blessing to its activities in the transport sector. However, in the past decade, the organisation has paid the price for a number of poor political decisions (including backing losing presidential candidates in successive elections). These decisions culminated in a security crackdown that has eroded the Mungiki's business interests, destabilised its previously tightly hierarchical structure and driven much of its activity further underground than ever before.