Witchcraft Raid Outside Governor’s Home Sparks Political Conspiracy Theories in Kenya

Four people found with ritual items near a politician’s residence were beaten by villagers before police intervened, but the real mystery might be who orchestrated the entire scene.

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Late October 2025 brought something unusual to Kyasila village in Kenya, an incident that sits at the intersection of traditional beliefs and modern politics.

Late one night, residents spotted something that immediately set off alarm bells. Four people were moving around near the home of Machakos County Governor Wavinya Ndeti, and they weren’t just taking an evening stroll.

What the Villagers Found

The group consisted of two women and two men, and they were carrying small calabashes and wearing red clothing. In that region, these items are strongly associated with witchcraft practices. In many parts of Kenya, these aren’t just random objects. They’re specific tools that people believe are used in rituals meant to harm others.

The villagers didn’t call the police first and wait around. They quickly moved in and apprehended the four individuals, giving them no room to escape. By the time law enforcement showed up, things had already gotten violent. The four people had been beaten by the crowd and were sitting on the ground with visible wounds from the attack.

Video footage from the scene captures something disturbing. Someone can be heard telling the detained individuals to explain what they were doing, and then adds that someone has gone to get a car tire. In some parts of Africa, a tire placed around someone and set on fire is a form of mob execution called necklacing. The threat was clear and terrifying.

The police arrived before that could happen, but the fact that it was even mentioned shows how seriously the villagers took this.

The Law Gets Complicated

The legal situation is genuinely confusing, and it goes back almost a hundred years.

Kenya has something called the Witchcraft Act that’s designed to protect the public against people practicing witchcraft. Under this law, anyone who presents themselves as a witch doctor capable of causing fear, annoyance, or injury to another person, or who claims to exercise any kind of supernatural power, witchcraft, sorcery, or enchantment intended to cause such harm, can be found guilty of an offense and face up to five years in prison.

The law itself contains a fundamental contradiction. The statute uses phrases like “so-called witchcraft,” which suggests the lawmakers weren’t even sure if they believed in it. The Act also uses the word “purported” when talking about occult power and occult knowledge.

The law punishes you for practicing something it simultaneously suggests might not be real. It’s like having a law against capturing Bigfoot while also calling Bigfoot “so-called” and “purported.”

For the four people caught near the governor’s home, this legal confusion meant something practical. They probably couldn’t be charged with witchcraft itself. The most likely charge would be trespassing. The law does allow police to arrest people for practicing witchcraft and take them to court, where they’re entitled to a fair hearing like any other accused person. But proving someone actually practiced witchcraft is a different challenge than proving they were somewhere they shouldn’t have been.

The Political Angle

This is where things take a turn that had many Kenyans raising questions. Social media exploded with reactions that ranged from genuine curiosity about witchcraft practices to outright suspicions that the entire incident had been staged for political reasons. Multiple people suggested online that a politician might have orchestrated the whole thing to gain sympathy votes, with some speculating that the four people caught might not have even known they were supposedly involved in witchcraft.

One person laid out the theory directly: The whole scene, with these individuals being caught near the Governor’s residence at Mua Hills and then beaten by the mob, looks staged. They might have been used without their knowledge, perhaps because a politician needed sympathy votes.

Consider the governor’s situation at the time. Governor Wavinya Ndeti was dealing with threats of impeachment from a local politician named Dominic Maitha, who serves as the MCA for Muthwani Ward. By April 2025, those whispers had grown loud enough that Ndeti actually reached out to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission herself, asking them to investigate her administration thoroughly so she could disprove what she called unfounded claims from her critics.

A dramatic incident where someone appears to be targeting the governor with witchcraft, right when she’s facing political attacks, could shift public opinion in her favor. People might think their governor is being unfairly targeted by desperate opponents.

But proving it was staged would be almost as difficult as proving those four people were actually casting spells.

Witchcraft in Machakos Has Deep Roots

Machakos County has been wrestling with witchcraft beliefs and practices for generations.

Back in the mid-1950s, something remarkable happened in Machakos. Close to a thousand people who identified as Kamba witches and witchdoctors actually came forward in response to requests from government officials. They agreed to surrender their ritual paraphernalia so it could be publicly burned, and they renounced witchcraft in front of everyone. In exchange, the government promised them amnesty and their neighbors agreed to give them a fresh start. The whole campaign became known as the Machakos witch-cleansings.

That was seventy years ago, but the beliefs haven’t faded. Witchcraft still maintains a powerful hold in many parts of Kenya, particularly in Machakos, Kisii, Kitui, and the coastal towns. Even in Nairobi, which is obviously a modern city, there’s been an increase in the number of witch doctors advertising their services, with posters plastered on streets throughout the city.

Believing in witchcraft can turn deadly. Human rights organizations in Kenya have documented something they call the “weaponization” of the old colonial-era anti-witchcraft law. People are using it to justify killing others as self-defense, claiming they were protecting themselves from witches. A research group from Haki Yetu, a human rights organization based in Mombasa, verified more than 250 murders between 2020 and 2022 just in Kenya’s coastal counties alone.

That number represents real people being killed over accusations that may or may not have any basis in reality.

The Police Saved Their Lives

When the police showed up, they took the four people into custody and transported them to the station to begin investigating their actions and what they intended to do. One of the women was elderly and had trouble getting up and climbing into the back of the police land cruiser. One of the villagers actually helped her up.

That small detail is striking. Even after beating her, someone helped her into the police vehicle. These situations exist in a strange space where people can be violent and helpful almost simultaneously, acting on beliefs that are deeply ingrained but also deeply contradictory.

Without police intervention, those four people would very likely have been killed. The mention of the tire makes that clear. Mob justice in witchcraft cases is a well-documented problem in Kenya, where fear and anger can completely override any sense of due process or legal procedure.

Questions Without Good Answers

Several things about this incident don’t quite add up, and people online were quick to point them out.

First, there’s the security issue. Multiple people on social media asked a reasonable question: “Doesn’t their home have security?” Governor Ndeti isn’t just any resident. She’s a government official, and her residence at Mua Hills would presumably have some level of protection. How did four people get close enough to be conducting a ritual without security noticing first?

If they had security and the four people got through anyway, that’s concerning for different reasons. If they didn’t have security, that raises its own questions about whether this was really seen as a serious threat.

Then there’s an economic puzzle that surrounds many witchcraft accusations. One person online observed: “I wonder why witches are so poor, despite being able to bewitch money into their lives.”

It’s a darkly humorous observation, but it points to something real. If someone truly had supernatural powers to harm others or change their fortunes, why would they be in circumstances where they’re vulnerable to being caught and beaten by a mob? The four people arrested didn’t look like they were living lives of supernatural success.

How Kenyans Reacted

The incident created a split in public opinion that shows how divided people are on these issues.

Some people took a surprisingly progressive stance. One person argued: “Why are they being beaten? They are conducting their own ritual. If you called a pastor to pray, the devil wouldn’t be beaten, he’d just be rebuked and sent to hell.” If someone has the religious freedom to pray to God, why doesn’t someone else have the freedom to perform their own rituals, even if others find them disturbing?

On the other side, some people expressed genuine terror about what witchcraft might be capable of doing. One commenter wrote: “Absolutely! These witches should be stopped. You work hard and diligently, but a witch doesn’t want you to succeed, they want you to fail. Lord, have mercy on us. The things they do are beyond belief.”

That comment reveals the real fear that drives these situations. For people who truly believe in witchcraft’s power, this isn’t about superstition or folklore. It’s about genuine threats to their wellbeing, their livelihoods, their families. They see stopping witches as self-defense, not persecution.

What Actually Happened

Were these four people genuinely trying to harm the governor through supernatural means? Were they innocent people set up as part of a political scheme? Were they there for some completely unrelated reason and just happened to have the wrong items with them?

The investigation that followed their arrest hasn’t produced any public conclusions that definitively answer those questions. Every explanation seems both plausible and questionable at the same time.

If it was a setup, it was remarkably elaborate. You’d need to find four people willing to participate, get them near the governor’s home with incriminating items, and somehow ensure that villagers would discover them at just the right moment. Politics in Kenya, like politics anywhere, has seen elaborate schemes before. But who’s going to agree to have the pulp beaten out of them?

If it was genuine witchcraft practice, why choose such a public location near a heavily populated area where discovery was almost inevitable? Practitioners of any kind of secretive ritual tend to be more cautious about where they work.

If it was just coincidence, the timing with the governor’s political troubles seems remarkably unfortunate for all involved.

What This Reveals About Kenya Today

The real story here might not be about what happened that night, but about what the incident reveals. Kenya is a country where a law from 1925 is still on the books, creating legal confusion. It’s a place where traditional beliefs remain powerful enough that a mob will beat suspected witches before calling authorities. It’s a nation where human rights organizations are documenting hundreds of murders justified by supernatural accusations.

At the same time, it’s a country where people debate these issues on social media, where some defend religious freedom even for practices they don’t personally believe in, where conspiracy theories about political manipulation spread just as fast as fear of witchcraft itself.

The Kenya Law Reform Commission has acknowledged that the Witchcraft Act needs to be reviewed and brought in line with the current Constitution. The Act still references outdated administrative structures from before Kenya’s constitutional reforms, including District Commissioners who no longer exist in the same form.

But updating a law is one thing. Changing deeply held beliefs that have existed for generations is something entirely different. Until a majority of Kenyans stop believing in witchcraft’s power to harm, these incidents will likely continue happening, caught in that strange space between traditional belief systems, colonial-era legislation, and modern democratic politics.

The four people who were beaten that night in Kyasila village represent something larger than just their individual case. They’re caught in competing forces. Whether they’re victims, perpetrators, or pawns, their story shows how complicated it can be when ancient fears meet contemporary politics, and when the law itself can’t quite decide what’s real and what isn’t.

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NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.