“For a man who was barely literate, his evolution from an uncouth illiterate preacher to a respected one—and that was probably the only credible miracle he ever performed—was intriguing.”
ABIMBOLA ADELAKUN FROM PUNCH
For those of you who watched the BBC Africa documentary, Disciples: The Cult of TB Joshua (three episodes), an expose on the Synagogue Church of All Nations’ late founder Temitope Joshua and still insist on defending him, I have four words: you are not serious. Yes, the whole lot of you. Your faces are looking funny in the light. Some defenders—understandably—grapple with the contradictions of a man who artfully constructed his public image as a good yet profoundly misunderstood man. The rest of you, still bonded into Joshua’s cult of personality, are being obtuse.
You query, why now that he is dead? Some of these stories have been in the public domain for a while. Was your reaction any different then? Since there is no statute of limitations on when victims can talk about their experiences, and it likely took Joshua’s death for them to finally shake themselves out of their nightmarish reverie to seek closure, there is nothing suspect about the timing.
Some also asked why people would willingly subject themselves to such gross abuse. If they had ever studied the nature of cults, they would have understood how and why people become victims. And so what if the ‘disciples’ speaking up now are bitter because of the succession battles that followed Joshua’s demise, as some speculated? The crucial is whether the accounts are credible.
To some extent, the documentary’s revelations are not shocking to those of us who have known about Joshua’s SCOAN as far back as the 1990s when radio broadcaster Kola Olawuyi did an expose on him. What Olawuyi revealed at that time gave away the Synagogue as a mix of cultic and occultic practices.
Watching Disciples, I could not help but wonder if the scandal-ridden nature of his ministry was also not part of the problem. Could it be that the man’s infractions were so sensational(ised) that reports stopped mattering? Sometimes, the best way to get away with a crime is to overcommit it so that the sheer scale would petrify those who would otherwise lead the outrage against you. Or could it be that the people who should have spoken up recognised themselves in him and did not want their own hypocrisy called out? Because, when you dissect it, his sins were not unique; it is the extent that is outrageous.
They said his miracles were staged, but that would also be true for about 99 per cent of all miracles, especially televised ones. Miracles are supposed to be irruptive of reality. Once you train a camera on a set scene, whatever actions you record are no longer ‘miraculous’ but calculated dramatic actions. That is why performed miracles are studied as theatre. They said Joshua was abusive, but physical and sexual abuses are endemic to religion. Making people ‘disciples’ involves grooming, indoctrination, and disciplining them in ways that too quickly devolve into abuse. They said Joshua’s methods were fetish, but was he any more paganistic than the popular Nigerian church that buried 15 Bibles in the church foundation? He did what most ministers did, but he also superseded them.
Yes, I am also aware that the Synagogue leadership has denied the ‘characters’ that appeared in that video (an ironic use of metaphor for a church accused of staging miracles), but the reflexive defence is to be expected. The Catholic Church also defended the paedophilic priests among its rank before finally confronting the truth. It took years, and a mounting pile of evidence before the church started making some changes. If they had maintained their defiant stand, they would have eventually crumbled under the weight of their hypocrisies.
