THE VIDEO recording is grainy, but not so distorted that you can’t clearly make out the blood-covered baby nestling between Miriam Nyeko’s legs. Before the child was born, doctors insisted that Miriam wasn’t pregnant. Yet here is baby Daniel in a Kenyan hospital, screaming for all his lungs are worth.
Now take another scene, this time in the office of Archbishop Gilbert Deya at his evangelical church in South London. Anne, a 35-year-old Nigerian-born woman, displays her pregnant belly — five or six months into her term — yet she says her pregnancy tests are negative. So were the tests before she gave birth to another baby . . . less than three months ago.
Confused? Well, you are not alone. So are the Kenyan and British police, social workers in London and clergy in the UK and Africa. The only man who isn’t confused is Archbishop Deya. For him, the answer is simple; these are “miracle babies”, and they just keep on coming.
The self-styled archbishop is head of Gilbert Deya Ministries, a church with 36,000 members at branches in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Luton, Nottingham, Watford, Reading and Leeds. In Kenya, Guyana, Canada, Nigeria and Zimbabwe he has tens of thousands more followers. Last week his wife, Mary, was arrested in Nairobi and 21 “miracle” babies and young children, including some of her own, were taken into care. Another baby, supposedly Anne’s, had already been taken in by social workers in the UK after tests showed its DNA did not match hers.
In Kenya there is talk of a major child-trafficking operation. Almost 50 couples have come forward claiming that the miracle babies are really their children, snatched or spirited away over a 14-year period. One of Deya’s Kenyan flock, 56-year-old Eddah Odera, claims to have given birth to 13 miracle children — some as little as two months apart — but DNA tests have failed to link any of them to her or her husband, Michael.
Kenyan police say DNA tests have established that at least five of Deya’s own children (he claims to have 13) are not his. Yet the archbishop, who continues to preach in London, argues that all the children are gifts from God.
Gilbert Deya was born 52 years ago in Kenya to a religious mother and a faithless father. He says he was delivered in church as his mother, Monica, was giving a sermon. As a child, he claims, he was blessed with powers of healing. “In 1967 something came to me as a light and I fell on the floor, like a dead person,” he says. “I woke up screaming, saying ‘I am seeing Jesus!’ Christians were consulted, witch doctors were consulted and we found that the power of Jesus in me was strong.
“My mother slaughtered a cow and the whole family sang God’s glory and I was ordained a minister.” He says he was made an archbishop by Dr Charles Hardin, the head of Evangelical Churches of America, in 1993 and two years later he established his first church in London.
We meet at the church, an old factory bought for £1 million, five days after the arrest of his wife. His Kenyan lawyer has just called to warn him that the British immigration authorities — if not the police — are due to arrest him at any moment.
There is a constant wailing and screaming about the place as almost continuous services drive out “demons and curses” from his congregation.
Outside his office is a collection of his books and videos. Here, Casting out the Devil in Jesus’ Name and Dangerous Prayers to Break Satan’s Forces; there, How to Receive Prosperity Miraculously and Miracle Babies: A 52-year-old Woman Giving Birth Every Two Months, 14 Years After Her Menopause. Another, Effective Prayers Which Bring Solutions to Problems, features him in front of a private jet with his name on the fuselage.
The archbishop is wearing a sharp grey suit and tie and he has made me sign a declaration that I will not fabricate anything to discredit him or his church.
“My wife and I have been blessed with 15 children,” he says. “Unfortunately, two died and now the Kenyan police are claiming that the rest are not my children. One hundred and thirty people have come forward saying that they are theirs. This is scandalous.
“My wife has been put into a police cell in Nairobi but there are no charges. I cannot understand what has been happening — it is beyond the comprehension of man because what we are seeing are miracles.
“The Church of England and the Kenyan Government are trying to destroy my family, but before they got into power ten Kenyan politicians came running to me asking if they would win the election. I said ‘Yes, on condition that you look after the poor people’. Now, according to these same men, I am a child trafficker. That is ridiculous and horrible. They are saying I am transferring babies from Kenya to the UK. That is a serious allegation because it is criminal — and a criminal cannot lead 36,000 people.”
Among these followers are Anne and her husband, James, a mental health worker. Their real names cannot be published because they are involved in a court battle to regain custody of the child who was taken into care in London after the negative DNA test. They cannot disclose details, other than that the child was born at the Mama Lucy Clinic in the slums of Nairobi after British doctors said Anne was not pregnant.
James and Anne are at liberty, however, to discuss the case of their latest miracle baby, Joshua, who was born at Mama Lucy’s on June 2, again after doctors had said she was not pregnant.
Anne, a fresh-faced woman in a yellow dress and black headband, says she suffered all her life from asthma and sickle cell anaemia before she saw Archbishop Deya preaching on a digital TV channel. “I was spending almost half my life in and out of hospitals, then I came to see the archbishop and I was cured immediately,” she says. “I haven’t had any problems since.”
Early this year Anne began showing signs of pregnancy, yet tests by her GP and scans in hospital in January and April proved negative. Her doctor told her she had a liver condition. Still convinced she was pregnant, she consulted the archbishop’s wife, who has an uncanny reputation for predicting births, and was told she was carrying a child.
“I could feel it moving and kicking,” recalls James. “We were building up communication, a kind of relationship with the child. Anne’s belly was growing really large — friends, relatives and perfect strangers were asking us when the baby was due.”
Anne decided to fly to the Mama Lucy Clinic in May for a second opinion. There, she was told she was pregnant. Significantly, given that she had undergone a similar earlier “pregnancy” that resulted in the child being taken into care, she went to the British High Commission in Nairobi and asked for someone to witness the birth. Her request was turned down.
On June 2, she says, Joshua was born. “He was staying with the archbishop’s family but now he has been taken by the police. I have not even applied for a passport to bring him home because I don’t think the authorities will believe me,” she says. “But he is my son and I hate to leave him behind. Now I am advanced in pregnancy again but I took a test and again it was negative. This is God’s will and if he wants to use me to demonstrate his power on earth, then so be it.”
James and Anne display utter candour when they tell their story. Whatever comes to light during the police investigations, it is clear they believe absolutely that Anne was pregnant and that she gave birth. Asked how they could account for the fact that the earlier child’s DNA did not match theirs, James says: “You can’t explain everything with science. We are having the baby in the UK with as many witnesses as possible, but we have been told by our solicitor that even if there was a DNA match, we would not get to keep the baby. But let people be patient; these miracles cannot be explained and they are ongoing.”
Similarly sober and candid is 44-year-old Ugandan-born Charles Nyeko, a product designer and Miriam’s husband of eight years. He and Miriam already have two daughters, aged 12 and 6, and she has suffered a number of miscarriages. “In January this year, Miriam said she thought she was pregnant — her legs and ankles swelled, she was getting back pains and her stomach began to grow,” he says. “She consulted Mama Mary (Archbishop Deya’s wife), who said there was a baby inside her. In May, she had a pregnancy test but the results were negative. But she was definitely pregnant — I could feel the baby kicking inside her.”
In July, Miriam flew to Kenya to attend the Mama Lucy Clinic. Like Anne, she was told she was pregnant and on July 19 Daniel was born.
“I heard him crying down the phone — it was a miracle,” says Nyeko. “The next month, the police raided the archbishop’s home and locked Miriam and the baby up in a cell. One of the guards let her text me, and she said the baby was ill and vomiting. It is breaking my heart; my wife and son are under arrest and I can do nothing to help them.”
Kenyan police also arrested Dr Danson Njoroge,a doctor whose name was used on paperwork at the clinic, but he denied all knowledge of the births. The Kenyan media quoted him as saying: “I don’t know how these people got my documents. This must be a miracle.”
David Ochieng, a spokesman for the clinic, has rejected claims made by the Oderas, the couple with 13 supposed-miracle babies, that their children had been born there. “There is no way somebody can give birth twice a year,” he said. “This has never happened since God created man.”
The African media later reported that at least eight people working in the clinics had no professional certificates or practising licences. Several were arrested by the Kenyan Criminal Investigations Department and earlier this week Mrs Deya, Mrs Nyeko, the Oderas and Rose Kiserem, one of Archbiship Deya’s pastors from London, were charged with child theft.
Investigations focus on the Mama Lucy Clinic, which has been closed down, and a maternity hospital in Nairobi. Seventeen of the women who have come forward to claim the miracle babies say they gave birth at Pumwani hospital but were told their babies had died shortly after birth.
Undeterred by all this, Archbishop Deya still insists that the births were miracles and that the Kenyan Government is setting out to discredit him. And if that were to happen, the results would be costly for him.
Unlike many churches, Gilbert Deya Ministries, a registered charity, is thought to be exceedingly wealthy. The archbishop refuses to discuss finances but it is known that members of the church are expected to donate a proportion of their salaries.
If each gave only £5 a week, the annual income would amount to almost £9m in the UK alone. Accounts for 2002-03 filed with the UK Charity Commission show an income of just £884,676 and an expenditure of £739,667. That income equates to an average donation of 47p per churchgoer per week.
In Kenya, Deya is regarded as a wealthy man who claims to have ministered to President Mwai Kibaki. He owns a large home in Nairobi and a Mercedes with a personalised number plate and enjoys a lavish lifestyle. In a letter to the president over the arrest of his wife, he writes that his children are missing their “special food, driver and nannies”.
Among his congregation he is thought of as a man who performs miracles. If that illusion were shattered, donations to the church would plummet. Already, with police DNA tests (according to media reports in Kenya) showing that Mrs Odera’s 13 miracle babies are not her own, one lucrative cash cow has been slaughtered; the church’s website and all its literature request donations towards the upkeep of the Odera family. They will now surely dry up.
So what of Miriam Nyeko and Daniel, the latest miracle baby? The video of Miriam in a stark delivery room at the Mama Lucy Clinic is less than conclusive; the actual birth of the boy is not shown. However, when we played it to Dr Ronald Lamont, a fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, he said the aftermath of the birth looked authentic.
“The umbilical cord is a bit scrawny, but that is not unusual in premature babies,” he says. “The cord is attached to the baby and, in turn, you can see it is attached to the placenta when that is delivered from the mother. It looks real enough to me. There’s nothing at all in it that looks faked. But not being able to see the actual birth is problematic.”
Dr Lamont says that after 14 weeks, pregnancy tests can produce negative results because of hormonal changes. Harder to explain, however, is a negative ultrasound scan, the results of which Charles Nyeko had shown me.
So, if the British doctors were right, and Miriam wasn’t pregnant, could she have believed she was? According to Dr Rosalind Bramwell, a senior lecturer in reproductive health psychology at Liverpool University, she could.
“People can produce quite extreme physical symptoms out of suggestion and auto-suggestion,” she says. “A psychosomatic loop can develop where a person is told they are pregnant, develop some mild symptoms, then believe it more, develop more symptoms and so on.
“The really tragic thing is that when a baby is produced and the woman is told it’s hers, she will be as attached to that child as any biological mother. To have it then taken away would be very traumatic.”
On Wednesday, Charles Nyeko was devastated when I broke the news to him that police in Kenya were telling journalists that Daniel and Miriam were not related by DNA. “I can’t understand why all this is happening,” he said. “As a human being, I am nowhere right now. All I know is that I am 101 per cent sure I am the father of that child and Miriam is the mother. You have seen the video.”
Yes, but as Dr Lamont said, without seeing the delivery, no firm conclusions can be reached. What is clear is that in the video Mrs Nyeko is heavily sedated with what appears to be pethidine, a form of synthetic morphine used in child deliveries. At one point, a doctor can be heard asking her whether she has regained consciousness. All she can do is groan a weak reply.
There are photographs, too, souvenirs of what should have been a happy occasion, and Nyeko hands them out like any proud father. Several appear to show Miriam in labour. Yet, without a pregnancy being recorded in the UK, and in the absence of a DNA match, Charles Nyeko knows that — short of a miracle — he will never be able to bring “his” boy home.
