Every nation, in its hour of moral emergency, calls for a particular kind of labourer. Wartime calls for soldiers, famine for farmers. Kenya, in this hour, is calling for exorcists — the kind who can stare down two spirits that have colonised our national body: the spirit of the goon, and the spirit of Mammon.
These two are not cousins in separate rooms of our national house. They are a single marriage. Mammon funds the goon; the goon protects Mammon — a covenant against the Kenyan soul that neither election cycles nor sermons alone will break.
We need degoonisers. We need demammonizers. Kenya's next great vocation is not a job title — it is an exorcism ministry, open to all comers.
All Saints Cathedral, Nairobi, recently held a cleansing service for its own buildings, after goons invaded the grounds to disrupt an empowerment programme meant for the public. Goons come to kill, steal, and destroy. But behind every gallant goon is a determined Mammon, who promotes itself by throwing money at everything. When All Saints cleansed her chapel, she was not only restoring a building — she was pushing back against Mammon, who makes goonism possible. Of course a holy place can be cleansed.
But if a cathedral can be cleansed after an invasion of goons, why do we behave as though the public square — the streets, the tender boards, the ballot, the boardrooms — cannot? Kenya is not less capable of cleansing than a cathedral. It is simply less practised at it.
Call the work exorcism, cleansing, or sprinkling — Kenya may need all three languages before it finds the one that finally moves it. Whatever we call it, it needs workers: degoonisers, to do it to the goon's pipeline, and demammonizers, to do it to Mammon's purse.
A degooniser dismantles the pipeline turning Kenya's idle, angry, economically stranded youth into hired instruments of violence — the pipeline on display at All Saints, and again when sixty-five young Kenyans were killed in the streets during the June 2024 protests. To degoonise is to starve that pipeline at both ends: stop producing recruitable young men, stop paying for their recruitment.
A demammonizer breaks the grip of money as the functional god of our public life — the god that turns tenders into loot, harambees into laundering schemes, "development" into a euphemism for capture. To demammonize is to strip Mammon of the authority we keep handing it every time we call corruption "how things work here" instead of naming it idolatry.
Marks of a degooniser
A degooniser is not merely someone who condemns violence after the fact, weeping over bloodied pavements while doing nothing to dry up the river that fed the flood. That is grief theatre, not deliverance. A true degooniser does three things.
She refuses to raise a goon — the domestic front of this war, where mothers, fathers, and coaches refuse to let a young man's idleness and rage be recruited by anyone with cash and a cause. A boy given purpose and dignity by people who love him is a boy no goon-master can buy.
He names the goon-master, not merely the goon. Our habit is to hurl anger at the visible fist while the hand that hired it walks free into State House lounges and church pews. Isaiah rebuked not only the idol but the goldsmith who cast it. We must do the same.
And she insists on memory. Kenya has a genius for amnesia, and every goon-master depends on it. The sixty-five killed on June 25, 2024, must not become a statistic. Memory is resistance; forgetting is collaboration.
Marks of a demammonizer
If the degooniser deals with the fist, the demammonizer deals with the purse — the harder ministry, because Mammon rarely announces itself with violence. It announces itself with generosity, "opportunity," a cheque that clears before conscience can catch up.
He interrogates every gift. Not every offering is holy because it was given, nor every "empowerment" empowering because it was branded so. Citizen capture happens one grant, one harambee, one tender at a time, until the captured citizen mistakes his chains for his coat. Isaiah's invitation was radical because it inverted our market logic: "Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price." Mammon trains us to believe nothing good comes free; the Gospel insists otherwise.
She practises institutional integrity even when it costs the institution. Churches, universities, and professional bodies routinely launder tainted offerings into respectability. An institution inherits the character of those who build and fund it. A demammonizer would rather lose the donation than lose the institution's soul.
And he redefines wealth publicly — as long as the tenderpreneur remains our cultural hero, Mammon's throne is secure. The demammonizer insists the abundant life Christ promised was never denominated in shillings.
The goon breaks kneecaps. Mammon breaks nations — more slowly, more politely, and with a receipt. Degoonise without demammonizing, and the goon simply finds a new paymaster. Demammonize without degoonising, and the streets still answer to whoever pays for chaos. You cannot legislate a nation out of the worship of Mammon or the manufacture of goons. You can only disciple it out — one refused bribe, one undisciplined son turned purposeful, one institution that says no to tainted money.
The church must leave the building
Here, then, is the push to the church that knew how to cleanse its own sanctuary: come outside and do it again — not with holy water sprinkled from a vessel, but with uprightness sprinkled from a life. The instrument is conviction, not liturgy: persuading a generation that righteousness delivers a nation into peace and prosperity. Show a young man that integrity is what will finally make him and his country rich in the ways that last, and he walks out consecrated, just as that cathedral did.
A consecrated person does not stay consecrated alone. Every convicted man or woman becomes, without title or ceremony, an agent of this cleansing wherever they next stand — the matatu tout who will not bribe the officer, the procurement meeting that will not pad the figures, the family table where a son learns that manhood is not measured in who fears him. This is what it means to sprinkle moral waters in every space of engagement and every transaction of dealing — a habit performed daily on a nation. The church has perfected cleansing what happens inside her walls on Sunday. Kenya is waiting for her to cleanse what happens outside them on Monday.
A call
This is not a call for another task force. It is a call for a movement of ordinary exorcists.
Two spirits currently hold joint tenancy over the Kenyan soul. They will not leave because we are polite to them. They leave the way every stronghold in Scripture has ever left — named, confronted, and starved of the fuel that sustains them.
Degoonisers and demammonizers needed. Kenya has enough spectators. The vacancy is for exorcists.
