Disciple of Evil (1)

Deya is a 63-year-old, Bentley-driving preacher. The self-styled “Archbishop”, who claims to perform healing miracles at his services across the UK, has raised millions in donations and tax breaks since his charity opened in 1997. The charitable status of his church has already been investigated twice, and he has been fighting extradition to Kenya for years. Allegations against Deya initially surfaced in the Kenyan media in 2004 and he has been wanted by Kenyan authorities since his arrest in the UK in 2006 to face allegations of child-trafficking. Police in Kenya allege that Deya’s “miracle babies” are part of an international baby-snatching ring, connected to disappearances from hospitals in Nairobi.

Kenyan police allege that several children were sold to Deya by women living in slums in Nairobi. According to Radik Malinskow, who works for child-trafficking charity HAART in Kenya, poverty has a large part to play.

“Some of those woman have several children to feed and often they find it difficult to accommodate a new child,” he told IRIN. “The poverty in the slums is very high. Women find it very difficult to cope with the lack of economical resources and some of them have to survive on one or two dollars a day.”

Gilbert Deya Ministries describes itself as a Christian charity that aims to spread the word of God. Its website, which presents Deya as a visionary ordained by God, refutes the “negative publicity” surrounding Deya’s “miracles” stating: “the truth remains he has never been found guilty by the court of law in the UK”. In his 2003 book “Curses of Sexual Sins”, Deya declares AIDS a curse, calls homosexuality an “abomination”, suggests infertility may be caused by “generation curses”, and tells the reader he can help them with “miracle babies”. Despite the controversy surrounding the child-trafficking allegations and Deya’s possible extradition, his ministries have raised more than £10 million ($12.98 million) in the UK over the past decade, some of it public money from British charity Gift Aid tax breaks.

Gilbert Deya Ministries, which is based in London, has a number of churches across the UK, as well as a branch in Belgium. Publications by Deya and his church say there are also branches in India, Zimbabwe, and the United States. Deya has published books, maintains an extensive social media presence, and at one point ran a TV channel carried by Sky. Billboards for his tour in August this year in Manchester, UK, promised “unusual miracles”.

In 2014, Deya’s ministries had an annual income of more than £864,000 (some $1.4 million at the time). About 90 percent of this came from donations. An analysis of the ministries’ accounts on the Charity Commission website reveals “a cocktail of bad accounting”, according to Joe Saxton from nfpSynergy, a consultancy firm for charities. Typically, 70 percent of a charity’s spending is on “charitable activities”, and about one or two percent on governance costs. But, according to Gilbert Deya Ministry’s own accounts, it spent nothing on “charitable activities”, and its governance costs for 2014 were around 30 percent of its income. “An awful lot of questions have come out of the accounts,” said Saxton. “There are strange patterns of expenditure like writing off bad debts, and things that I can’t think of a logical explanation for.”

The Charity Commission’s website reveal that Gilbert Deya Ministries was late filing its accounts two years in a row. For 2012, the charity provided the regulator with its accounts 453 days late. The previous year, the accounts were 152 days late. Alongside this, the “charitable activities” expenditure, compared to its governance and legal costs, has dropped significantly. Its most recent accounts, in 2014, declare that it spent £0 on “charitable activities” in that year. In August, the Charity Commission announced the latest investigation into Deya’s operations, referring to issues related to “safeguarding” – a term used in connection with protection of children – whilst also raising concerns over the charity “selling olive oil to which it attributed healing qualities”. It also said the trustees “have failed to report serious incidents to the commission and to provide adequate responses to the questions raised”. Deya remains one of six trustees of the charity in the UK. Whilst the controversy surrounding Gilbert Deya Ministries persists, the charity continues to grow. Official land documents obtained by IRIN reveal that the charity made more than £3.8 million ($4.95 million) from the recent sale of its property in Peckham, London. It has since moved its headquarters to a Greater London suburb, Sutton. Posts on the Gilbert Deya Ministries Facebook page claim that the charity also purchased 3.54 hectares of land in Sutton, on which Deya says he aims to build a hotel and a petrol station.

Deya’s wife has been in and out of court and prison in Kenya on child-trafficking charges. Mary Deya was initially arrested in 2005. In 2007, she was sentenced to two years in prison for stealing a child and one year for obtaining a false birth certificate. She was convicted in a second case in 2011. In 2014, Kenya’s high court upheld her conviction, and, finally, in 2015, Mary Deya dropped a further appeal and continued to serve her time.

Attempts to extradite Deya to Kenya to face child-trafficking charges appear to have stalled. The Kenyan authorities requested his extradition in 2007. Deya appealed, stating that the extradition would breach his human rights and suggesting that his connection to Raila Odinga, the previous prime minister of Kenya, meant he could face torture back in his native country. Although he lost the appeal, the Home Office has never followed through with the extradition. In 2014, Kenyan media reported that one sticking point was that the UK had requested that Deya be held in one of two higher-standard prison facilities. the UK Home Office told Deya’s local MP that it was “considering further representations from Mr. Deya” claiming that his extradition would breach the European Convention on Human Rights.

MP David Lammy, told IRIN.

“Clearly there needs to be a review of how this despicable child trafficker and fraudster has been able to run rings around judicial and regulatory systems for so many years,” he said. “We should never forget that Gilbert Deya’s victims are innocent children who will have to live with his actions for the rest of their lives.”

Turning children into bombs

One in every five "suicide bombers" used by Boko Haram in the past two years has been a child, a report by UNICEF says.

"The use of children, especially girls, as so-called suicide bombers has become a defining and alarming feature of this conflict," Laurent Duvillier, regional spokesman for UNICEF said. "It's basically turning the children against their own communities by strapping bombs around their bodies."

Boko Haram child "suicide bombings" have surged ten-fold in West Africa in the last year, with children as young as eight, mostly girls, detonating bombs in schools and markets. Suicide bombings have spread beyond Nigeria's borders, with an increasing number of deadly attacks carried out by children with explosives hidden under their clothes or in baskets. Some young children probably did not know they were carrying explosives, which are often detonated remotely, Duvillier said. The tactic has proven effective in increasing the number of casualties as people do not usually see children as a threat.

There were 44 child "suicide bombings" in West Africa last year, up from four in 2014, UNICEF said, mostly in Cameroon and Nigeria. Three-quarters of the "suicide bombers" have been girls. Abducted boys are forced to attack their own families to demonstrate their loyalty to Boko Haram.

Almost one million Nigerian children are missing out on education as Boko Haram has destroyed more than 900 schools and killed more than 600 teachers, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

"Boko Haram is robbing an entire generation of children in northeast Nigeria of their education," Mausi Segun, Nigeria researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Early marriage, early death

Uganda which has one of the world's highest rates of pre-teen and teenage pregnancies as the east African nation struggles to enforce laws to clamp down on child marriages. 300,000 girls every year get pregnant. One in every four girls aged between 15 and 19 fall pregnant, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, and nearly half of girls are married before 18. Ugandan authorities have struggled to enforce laws that set a minimum marriage age of 18.

A study by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2013 indicated that early marriages and resultant pregnancies are the biggest cause of deaths among 15 to 19-year-old girls in Uganda, accounting for 20 percent of maternal deaths. Others of those who survive the pregnancies can suffer lasting complications like fistula and disability.

Nakubulwa Mayi, a senior midwife at Mulago Referral Hospital the biggest hospital in the country, said pre-teen pregnancies posed serious physical and emotional risks to young girls. "At this age a girl should be playing with dolls but not to have to handle a baby," she said. 

Ignorance on risks of child marriage, limited access to education for girls, cultures dictating girls should marry young, and poverty, have all contributed to this growing trend of child marriage in Uganda.

Agnes Igoye, assistant coordinator of the anti-trafficking task force at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, said early marriage is a form of sexual and gender-based violence with physical, social and economic effects. "Once married, few girls return to school even if it becomes economically viable," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Rising Levels Of Poverty Attributed To 'Resource Curse'

The loss of land and a gender hierarchy, among other factors, are forcing some young girls – with parental consent – to forsake school and turn to sex work on diamond mines in the Marange region of eastern Zimbabwe.

“Commercial sex among girls as young as 12 years has become a natural way out of poverty for these children and their families. They are using it as a coping mechanism in the wake of the negative effects on household livelihoods caused by mining activities in Marange,” Melanie Chiponda, programme manager of the Chiadzwa Community Development Trust (CCDT), an NGO, told IRIN.

Nationally, about 2.2 million people are faced by food insecurity, but food shortages and rising levels of poverty in communities in Manicaland province’s diamond fields are being attributed to the “resource curse”.

In 2008, artisanal miners were flushed from the Marange diamond fields by government security forces, and the state then issued commercial mining licences. Seven companies now mine the 60,000 hectare fields, but proximity to wealth has undermined rather than improved livelihoods.

“The mines took away pastures and farmland from the locals... This worsened hunger and affected household income, as families traditionally sold some of their crops and livestock to raise money for food, school fees and other basic needs,” Chiponda said. Local communities have also been excluded from low-skilled jobs on the mines because companies have branded them as lazy and disobedient, and rely on migrant workers from other provinces instead.

"Unfortunately, girls become part of the dirty game. Some of the girls get food handouts as payment for sex"

“Thousands of married men live in [single-sex] hostels at the mines and women are not allowed inside them. Given that most of the men come from faraway places, they end up resorting to commercial sex and, unfortunately, girls become part of the dirty game. Some of the girls get food handouts as payment for sex,” Stella Washaya, 50, a Marange villager and volunteer counsellor for vulnerable young girls, told IRIN.

Mine companies have now banned villagers from selling their produce, but between 2006 and 2008, artisanal miners stimulated the local economy by buying foodstuffs from the community. The companies also have a policy of confiscating livestock roaming onto their concessions, and mining activities have destroyed forests. In times of food insecurity, livestock are seen as a last resort, and wild fruits from the forests are eaten or sold along highways.

Freeman Bhoso, executive director of the Zimbabwe Natural Resources Dialogue Forum (ZNRDF), an NGO advocating sustainable and equitable exploitation of mineral resources, told IRIN that child sex work was a “natural offshoot” of the community’s exclusion from the diamond fields.

“Communities are not benefiting from the exploitation of resources, but are getting further impoverished. As a result, household members are forced to engage in activities - some of them life-threatening - that guarantee them bare survival. Child commercial sex is a symptom of poverty,” he said.

Washaya said, “Commercial sex among young girls has become a social crisis here. There are several thousands homesteads in Marange and I would say one in every five of these has at least one [girl] teenager engaging in sex for money.”

A nurse at one of the few health centres in the area, who declined to be identified, told IRIN: “We attend to at least 20 girls a month who have contracted STIs [sexually transmitted infections]. The men… insist on unprotected sex, a trend worsened by the fact that there are no programmes designed to educate them against the risky practice. Many young girls have dropped out of school due to unwanted pregnancies.”

"Now that I have a child, the burden has grown and sex with men is the easiest way to get some money"

In Marange, the prevalence of Apostolic religious communities advocating a boy’s education ahead of a girl’s, has seen some parents encouraging their daughters to enter the commercial sex trade to support the family, Washaya said.

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