The Kenya Defence Forces is pleased to announce to the public the 2026 Recruitment Drive. Get more details on the link below.
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A YouTuberโs $400,000 Ferrari caught fire in a dry cornfield, spread to the rental van beside it, and erased nearly half a million dollars within minutes ๐ณ๐
โWell, there goes half a million dollars, I guess.โ
Pablo Escobar, worth an estimated $3 billion in 1989, had his own prison built, with a waterfall and a football pitch. in 1993 police traced a phone call that ran past two minutes, and he died in a shootout on a rooftop in Medellรญn.
Forbes first listed him among the worldโs billionaires in 1987, and in 1989 estimated his wealth at about $3 billion. one estimate put the Medellรญn cartelโs income at around $420 million a week.
his brother Roberto, who kept the books, said the cartel spent about $2,500 a month on rubber bands and wrote off roughly 10% of the cash every year to rats and water damage. his son Sebastiรกn said Pablo once burned about $2 million to keep his daughter Manuela warm while the family hid in the mountains.
in 1991 he surrendered under a deal of five years at most and no extradition to the United States. the prison, La Catedral, was built to his own specifications. it had a football pitch, a jacuzzi, a bar, a waterfall and a telescope pointed at his familyโs home in Medellรญn.
in July 1992, after reports that he had four of his own men killed inside, the government ordered him moved to an ordinary prison. he refused and walked out through a section of wall built to be kicked open. then came about 16 months on the run, hunted by a 600 man unit called the Search Bloc. by the end he reportedly had no men and no money.
he kept in touch with his family by phone, pretending to be a journalist and keeping every call under two minutes. on December 2, 1993, a day after his 44th birthday, one call ran longer. police traced it to a house in Medellรญn and tried to arrest him. a gunfight broke out, and he died on the roof. how exactly he died is still disputed, and his family says he shot himself.
five years in a prison built to his own design: a deal or a joke?
Born in 1976 in Lunga Lunga, a self-styled Kenyan doomsday preacher Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, grew up in rural Kwale County, Kenya. After completing his secondary school education, he moved to Mombasa, where he initially sold flour out of a handcart and worked various odd jobs.
In the late 1990s, Mackenzie moved to the coastal town of Malindi and worked as a taxi driver. Fellow drivers from that period noted that he didn't initially even know how to drive, learning the skill on his sister's car with the help of a hired instructor.
Mackenzie grew up in the Africa Brotherhood Church, where he was a teenage choirmaster and Sunday school teacher. By 2002, he left after a dispute with church leadership and briefly joined a Baptist congregation.
In 2003, he teamed up with a local woman named Ruth Kahindi and officially establish the Good News International Church in Malindi.
Paul Mackenzie and Ruth Kahindi met at a Baptist church in Malindi. Impressed by his oratorical skills, Ruth invited him to preach at her home. Together, they officially co-founded the Good News International Church (initially called House of the Lord).
In the beginning, it operated as a completely conventional evangelical church. According to Ruthโs daughter, Naomi, Mackenzie preached normal salvation through faith, cross-examined standard biblical scriptures, and offered traditional hope.
While the local flock loved his charisma, a standard gospel in a highly saturated religious environment meant low cash flow, a lack of mass-scale followers, and faced tough competition from well established churches.
Mackenzie realized what many modern cult leaders discover: traditional messages of hope face steep competition, but fear, apocalyptic urgency, and anti-system conspiracy theories create absolute dependency.
Fear drives people to surrender their autonomy and assets. If the world is ending tomorrow, you don't need your bank account, your land title deed, or your propertyโyou give it to the "man of God" who is preparing your passage to heaven.
By 2008, Mackenzie completely pivoted his doctrinal model. He returned from a trip to Mombasa with an altered ideology. He began aggressively preaching that formal education was satanic, modern hospitals/medicine were evil, and government infrastructure was the "Mark of the Beast".
Ruth Kahindi recognized this as dangerous brainwashing designed to exploit vulnerable followers. She actively confronted him and tried to talk him out of it, warning him that forbidding medical care and demanding people's property under the guise of an imminent apocalypse was wrong.
Instead of listening, Mackenzie weaponized the congregation against her. He accused Ruth of witchcraft and embezzling church funds to ruin her reputation among the flock. Realizing she was fighting a losing battle against a man she described as a "stubborn boy," Ruth was effectively pushed out and left the church entirely to him.
Without Ruth there to question him, he transformed a struggling local church into a highly centralized, expanding cult machine.
Mackenzie didn't just push Ruth out; he actively stripped her of her legacy by recruiting her own family members into his inner circle.
Ruthโs son-in-law, Smart Deri Mwakalama, completely abandoned her side and aligned with Mackenzie. Mwakalama rose through the ranks during these transition years to become the official Church Secretary and, eventually, Mackenzieโs ruthless head of security and second-in-command.
During the 2008โ2015 window, Mackenzie proved that his new radical, anti-establishment message was highly marketable, and profitable. He shifted from a single location in Malindi to a multi-branch operation across the country, and established thriving new branches in major urban and rural hubs.
By planting these branches, he secured a steady, diversified stream of tithes and offerings from thousands of new followers nationwide, moving away from his early financial struggles.
It allows customers to complete transactions even when their account balance is insufficient, with an overdraft limit of up to KSh100,000.
-Maximum limit: KSh100,000.
-Available to individual and business customers.
-Repayment is automatically deducted from subsequent deposits.
-Limits are reviewed monthly based on account activity and repayment history.
Charges:
-2% one-time access fee.
-0.2% daily maintenance fee on the outstanding balance.
But there is one detail worth examining: the facility reportedly does not require a CRB check.
And this is where things get interesting.
For years, CRB listings have played a significant role in determining access to credit. Yet a credit listing and a person's actual ability to repay are two different things.
Consider someone listed over a HELB obligation but who receives regular income, operates an active bank account and has consistent cash flows.
That person may be a better lending prospect than their CRB status suggests.
Here is the bigger economic argument: Banks may be sitting on a largely underserved credit market by relying too heavily on historical credit records instead of assessing real-time cash flows.
Safaricom demonstrated the commercial potential of this model through Fuliza. Co-operative Bank's move raises an interesting question about whether traditional banks are beginning to rethink how they assess credit risk.
Perhaps the future of mass-market lending will be determined less by where you have defaulted in the past and more by what your actual financial behaviour tells a lender today.
Are we witnessing the gradual shift from credit-history-based lending to cash-flow-based lending in Kenya? Only time will tell.