The T.B. Joshua you don’t know

The black race is the most gullible religion-wise and Nigerians lead the pack. This is not surprising as the country boasts of being the giant of the black continent. Its narrow streets throng with worship places. Its atmosphere polluted by loudspeakers, smoking with passionate noise. The laity, peeled brazenly and sucked by money making schemes returns helplessly, again and again.

This strain of exploitability is however not as prevalent in other climes. This is especially so in societies where generations have been groomed to ask simple but barbed questions: climes where empirical approach to life trumps dark-skinned mediocrity.

They are not too easily tickled by deafening hallelujahs or hoaxed by so-called miracles wrapped in moin-moin leaves. They love to put their money where valid conviction speaks. Besides, they also understand there are no loudspeakers in paradise and have never been confused about whether the church is ordained both for charging the soul and the mobile phone.

Suddenly the good old adage that a prophet is not without honour except in his own country pops up.

From a country battling with a notorious reputation for exporting fraud, how has T.B. Joshua managed to win the hearts of nations thousands of miles away? It is a fact visible only to eyes that have chosen not to be selectively amnesic. What gimmick makes citizens of the white-skinned world troop out in the hundreds of thousands to receive a prophet from Nigeria?

Stage-managed? Well, the scenes could have been successfully replicated for Nigerian leaders. It goes without saying that if the leadership has half the goodwill T.B. Joshua enjoys overseas, Nigeria could be a better place.

It is an incontrovertible fact: NO religious organisation in Nigeria has EVER received and continues to welcome a consistent influx of foreigners like T.B. Joshua’s Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN).

It is an incontrovertible fact: NO religious organisation in Nigeria has EVER received and continues to receive a stream of foreign church workers willing to forsake the pleasures of their pleasant Oyinbo countries and pitch tents with the soft-spoken pastor in Ikotun.

From China, Korea, USA, UK, Denmark, Israel, Norway, Russia, Argentina, Belgium, Canada…everywhere! They board airplanes ‘by themselves’ and show up with high expectations. But from Lagos, Oyo, Kano, Anambra, Delta, Ebonyi, Ogun, Edo, Kwara, Niger, Bauchi…every state! Folks who won’t spend a thousand naira to ‘enter’ some rickety bus fastened together, almost, with ropes seem to know a thousand reasons why these Oyinbo visitors shouldn’t come to see a man dark-skinned like themselves. Paradox.

And so, does T.B. Joshua really really really do other women, teeny young girls and stuff? Is there a secret chamber at the Synagogue where juveniles are sexually instructed? Does the prophet corner beautiful babes during his countless itineraries around the globe? Or should the question ACTUALLY have been: why has no Oyinbo woman EVER accused the prophet accordingly: not even at the times when he is many countries away from the more lovely-looking Evelyn?

Away from stones hurled from shady distances or missiles fired from unscrupulous websites, a fact-finding trip to the SCOAN immediately disabuses any mind.

One of the realities first-time visitors have had to grapple with at the SCOAN is that EVERY worker in the church is T.B. Joshua. While the visitor’s sensibility staggers at having to deal with so many (sometimes 12) T.B. Joshuas at once, the church relaxes behind the formidable administrative style that NOBODY will ever be able to drive any private agenda through the Man of God.

And let’s wax a little spiritual. No strange woman gets close-up with Prophet T.B. Joshua and conceives the amorous. Hmnn… It’s not a topic for debate o! It’s an assignment. Go find out.

What about ‘fake’ healings? Well, perhaps you should first pray never to reach a point in health when your last hope will be to ‘try that man in Ikotun that they said is doing miracles’. It is amazing how solemn and sober it gets when despair beckons. Neither is it wise to deny the distressed what their faith happily validates.

That said, the SCOAN must surely have the world’s most complex, the world’s most advanced and the world’s most effective prank-making machinery to have sustained decades of stage-managed healings and miracles (in the tens of thousands) and spanning dozens of nations ‘plus including’ Oyinbo lands.

Are these dollar-bringing, economy-boosting, tourism-impacting folks trooping to the world’s poverty capital really gullible?

Come on! Let T.B. be!
Onikeku is a friend of the SCOAN