From robbing the dead to preaching

By Moses Michira

Kenya: His life history reads like the story line of a horror movie.

John Kibera led a most dangerous life, and was at one time among the most-wanted criminals in Kenya alongside hardcore criminals such as Wanugu and Wacucu.

He raided graveyards at night and stole expensive coffins and other valuables from the dead.

His would-be father-in-law stopped his wedding while the ceremony was underway in a church.

But today Kibera, 39, is a changed man and has even established a Christian ministry. He is now a street preacher in Nairobi after spending most of his life in crime where he escaped several police dragnets while nearly all his accomplices were brutally killed.

Digging graves

Kibera and his gang of eight would spend hours of the night digging up graves then leaving the decomposing bodies exposed to vagaries of the weather.

At one time, he had to feign his own death when the police intercepted his gang in downtown Nairobi after a carjacking incident that went wrong. Three of his colleagues were killed under a hail of bullets.

Kibera was hiding inside a coffin that was being delivered to a shop owned by an Indian in Parklands area, when the police cut short their mission.

“I decided that would be the end of my criminal ways,” said Mr Kibera, in an interview with KTN’s Jicho Pevu programme.

On his botched wedding, he says he is still bitter that it had to be stopped and his bride taken away as his groomsmen and priest watched helplessly.

He estimates that his gang had stolen no less than 1,000 coffins by the time he quit some ten years ago, which helped in amassing wealth, including property worth several million shillings.

Final theft

Among the assets that he owned but decided to give to charity after he became a Christian was a home in Kitengela worth Sh7 million and a four-storey block of apartments in Kawangware.

The apartment block now houses a children’s home and a rehabilitation centre for street families.

Before the final theft which ended fatally for his gang, Kibera had narrowly survived death on several occasions, including one where four accomplices were burnt to death by an angry mob for digging up a grave and stealing a coffin in Maragua.

Kibera says the incident was to mark the turning point in his life because of the painful way in which the four died, after the ruthless villagers descended on them with an assortment of weapons before setting them on fire, alive.

“This was particularly painful,” says the gangster-turned-preacher, who looks back with little regret about disturbing the dead.

Stealing coffins, Mr Kibera thought, was more saintly than harming the living because the dead do not have feelings.

Kibera, who was born in Kakamega, became a hardened criminal before attaining the age of 18.

He was about 15 when he was first arrested and sentenced to time in the juvenile prison as an accomplice in a robbery.

It has been in and out of jail for him since then, with the influence from fellow inmates contributing to his attributes as a hardcore criminal ranking alongside names like Wanugu and Wacucu, two of the country’s best known robbers.

Both Wanugu and Wacucu were hunted down by police and killed in cold blood after terrorising hundreds of households, sometimes even suspected to have been involved in murders and carjacking incidents.

Several robberies

Kibera was to turn himself in some time in 2003 even as a manhunt had been launched by the police who wanted to charge him for several counts of robberies he was suspected to have committed.

He was taken in and the charges preferred against him before he was tried in Nairobi’s Makadara Law courts.

To the shock of the magistrate and even the police, he pleaded guilty to all the charges and sought to be pardoned as he had changed.

He argued that the act of turning himself in was evidence enough.

The magistrate sentenced him to six months in jail. He was locked up at the Industrial Area prison where he spent the time reflecting on his criminal past and decided to become a preacher.

Today, he is a father of two living with his family in Kawangware in a house he owns.