TB Joshua’s undying appeal
Whistleblowers have claimed that many of TB Joshua’s so-called ‘miracles’ had been faked. But the revelations do not appear to have dented his followers’ faith.
When Temitope Balogun Joshua died in 2021, he was arguably the most famous religious figure in Africa. His Synagogue Church of All Nations attracted followers from all over the continent and the world, who gave him at least $14-million in contributions. But the late Nigerian televangelist was not as godly as he purported to be. Earlier this month, an investigation by openDemocracy and the BBC revealed allegations of rape, enslavement and torture against him. Whistleblowers also claimed that many of TB Joshua’s so-called ‘miracles’ had been faked. But the revelations do not appear to have dented his followers’ faith. Lydia Namubiru spoke to several church members to understand how they they first came into TB Joshua’s orbit – and why they remain there.
A woman in grief
When Rose Lungu’s parents separated, she was left feeling responsible for her younger sister. Only a child herself, she couldn’t help her sister’s early marriage; nor seeing her sent away from the marital home after a miscarriage.
Once Lungu was a bit more secure in her IT career, she set out to make it up to her. The elder sibling moved her dejected sister in with her, sent her back to school and, like a doting parent, even rewarded her with a trip abroad for a good exam result.
But this ended in abrupt tragedy when her sister died shortly after graduating from high school in 2015. About a month later, a grief-stricken Lungu – plagued by depression and nightmares – journeyed from Zambia to the Lagos compound of TB Joshua, a Nigerian televangelist whom she believed to be a miracle worker.
Nearly every TB Joshua believer speaks of a life history of exceptional hardship.
They sought out the pastor during a period of deep personal crisis. The real miracle the evangelist appears to have performed is convincing them it was their encounter with him that turned the tide.
At one point during her week-long stay in Lagos – paying the church up to $1,000 for the privilege – Joshua prayed over Lungu. She believes it made all the difference. “He touched my forehead, you know. And after that prayer, when I went to sleep, I saw a person who looked like my sister walking away from me. When I woke from that dream, I felt some peace, some relief. I could still feel the sorrow and so forth, but the grief was not as heavy as it was when I travelled there.”
For nearly a decade prior to her visit, Lungu had found herself hurrying back from her own church on Sundays to catch TB Joshua on Emmanuel TV, a television station run by Joshua’s church. “I started seeing extraordinary stories unfold before my eyes,” she said. Emmanuel TV led viewers to believe that Joshua was a spectacular miracle worker.
But in the recently-released BBC documentary, former workers at Joshua’s church own up to having falsified these miracles. Lungu dismisses the documentary as “a scandal” and “full of lies” – even though she had only one face-to-face encounter with Joshua.
It was through watching Emmanuel TV that Lungu first made contact with the church. “After some of these preachings, there were numbers on the screen. When you called, sometimes you actually spoke to somebody. Like a helpline.” The people on the line would also invite callers to become money-contributing partners.
“They would say, ‘Okay, you send the money like this,’ ” said Lungu. That’s how she started sending between $50-$100 a month to Joshua’s ministry. She still does, when she can.
The man of many miracles
Childhood wasn’t easy for Benjamin Akhiwu, growing up in his father’s polygamous homestead in northern Nigeria. As the child of neither wife, he was allotted a life of hardship and poverty.
When he was 12, he had a dream in which God showed him a guardian angel who would provide for him.
By 2000, Akhiwu was working as a junior doctor for the Nigerian Air Force in Jos when he heard patients make an extraordinary claim: that they had been cured of HIV by watching Joshua on television.
Akhiwu had a more pressing problem: money. “I was working for peanuts,” he said. He travelled nearly 1,000km by road to Joshua’s compound looking for his own miracle.
“When I got there, I explained to them my problems. One of the ushers laughed and told me that God had already answered my prayers and that it will be difficult for me to see the man of God,” he recalls. Angry about the wasted journey, he left the compound. But when four of his residency programme applications were accepted a month later, he concluded that the God of TB Joshua had worked for him. He bought a satellite TV dish and started watching Joshua’s broadcasts religiously.
Eight years later he became a paying partner. Although he visited the church a few times and testified to credit Joshua for this or that, Akhiwu didn’t get the prophet’s personal attention until 2014. He had just returned from a fellowship in Germany and testified about it in church.
The evangelist asked to meet him.
“On my way back to the airport to fly back to Jos, I got a phone call from Wiseman Christopher [one of Joshua’s closest colleagues] that Daddy wants to see me immediately. That was how my relationship with Daddy started,” he says.
Many of Joshua’s loyalists refer to him as Daddy.
Akhiwu says Joshua handed him an envelope containing 200,000 naira (about $1,200 then) in their first meeting. “I was confused. I hadn’t asked him for money. He said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no no, take it. This is a gift from God. And that I want to be seeing you every month in church’. ”
Akhiwu says that after that meeting, Joshua’s ministry often paid for tickets for him to come down to Lagos from Kano where he worked. They would put him up in the best rooms in the church compound and the prophet gave him money amounting to millions of naira.
Akhiwu came to see Joshua as the guardian angel that he had been promised in his childhood dream.
Akhiwu and his wife would testify frequently to Joshua’s miracles on those trips. In one testimony published by the church, he said he survived an ambush by armed bandits on the road to Kano.
Their bullets failed to hit his car because he was carrying bottles of water anointed by Joshua, he claimed.
In our interview with him, he said the anointed water helped him survive a plane crash. His wife, Hellen, a paediatrician, testified in the church in 2015 that Joshua helped her pass her board exams after four unsuccessful attempts; and in our interview she said his blessing also helped her carry a pregnancy to term for the first time after several miscarriages.
The miracle of whiteness
John Ugbaje was in his early 20s and in the congregation of a similarly charismatic Nigerian televangelist, Chris Oyakhilome.
Other clergy in Nigeria’s Christian community had dismissed Joshua as a fraud, but not Oyakhilome. It was here that Ugbaje heard something that intrigued him.
“Reverend Tom, that is Pastor Chris’s younger brother, said that ‘those of you travelling abroad to impress the whites, somebody is in Nigeria and they want to meet him’.” Ugbaje was intrigued. Who was the man to whom white people came? Soon after, he found the Emmanuel TV channel on DStv.
What he saw was a man beating all the odds. His miracles were very strange, and had alienated him from the Nigerian Christian establishment who feared his power came from voodoo practices. There was an actual tree growing in his church.
His English was faltering and he often just spoke Yoruba. But sure enough, there were white people in his congregation.
“I said to myself, ‘these white people are very wise. They are not moved by prosperity messages because they are already prosperous in their nations. So for them to keep on coming, something is happening. People are being healed; people are being delivered. That is why they will go and come back.’ That was my conviction,” said Ugbaje.
He has been a part of the congregation since, and has sent regular partner payments since 2008.
He says he still does.