Gilbert Deya: I enabled 22 infertile and menopausal women to have babies

Before 2004, self-styled Bishop Gilbert Deya was a high-flying man of the cloth with a huge following after his claims that he could help infertile and post-menopause women deliver miracle babies.

His fairy tale sojourns in the United Kingdom where his Bishop Gilbert Deya Ministries had an estimated membership of 40,000 started crumbling when the BBC investigative program “Face the Facts” unmasked a baby stealing racket disguised as miracle babies.

Still defiant after the expose, Deya explained that the births of children with DNA different from that of their alleged parents was the work of God, insisting the so-called miracle babies were beyond human imagination since he had enabled 22 infertile and menopausal women to have babies.

Miracle births do indeed happen.

“The miracle babies are not something I can explain because they are of God and things of God cannot be explained by a human being,” Deya said at the time.

It is a phenomenon that startled even Nairobi senior principal magistrate Robinson Ondieki who quoted several verses in the Bible about babies who were born through miracles but doubted if Deya performed similar miracles.

From God’s creation of Adam, the miraculous births of Abraham’s son Isaac, Manoah’s son Samson, Hannah’s son Samuel, and the Shunammite’s woman son to the of birth Jesus Christ, the magistrate’s analogy summarised that miracle births do indeed happen.

“The evidence in the Bible shows that miracle babies do happen but in the case of Bishop Deya, and whether he can perform miracle babies is another case the court cannot dwell on,” said Ondieki while acquitting the preacher.

In his previous interview with The Standard newspaper, Deya said he dropped out of school due to poverty but worked his way to fulfill his childhood vision of taking the gospel to Britain, a country where he found both fame and troubles.

Although his rise from the grass where he rubbed shoulders with paupers in the slums to grace where he dined with the rich could be a true work of a miracle, his miracle babies remained a mystery until his wife Mary Juma Deya was cornered and jailed for the offense of child theft and abduction.

Mrs Deya was jailed for a second time in January 2011 by a Kibera magistrate’s court after being found guilty of abducting a three-year-old baby boy. She had previously served a two-year jail term on similar charges of child abduction and child theft.

She was convicted by the then principal magistrate Grace Nzioka, now a High Court Judge, who ruled that the prosecution had supplied enough evidence to warrant her conviction.

Three years in jail for stealing the baby

Justice Nzioka gave her three years in jail for stealing the baby and an additional two years for each of the two counts of giving false information that she had given birth. The sentences were to run concurrently.

It was alleged that Mrs Deya stole the baby boy from Kenyatta National Hospital on September 10, 2005.

Doctors who testified during the trial told the court that the pregnancy tests done on her indicated negative results.

In her previous conviction in 2005, Mrs Deya was charged and found guilty of five counts of child stealing where it was alleged that she stole the children and hid them at their Mountain View Estate home between 2002 and 2004.

The charges stated that she stole a child and renamed him Elijah Opiyo Deya, the second child was renamed Miriam Adondo Deya, the third renamed Naomi Gilbert Deya, the fourth was Ruth Akello Deya, and the fifth was Joshua Gilbert Deya.

It the same charges, Bishop Deya faced trial for five years before he was acquitted by the magistrate on Monday.