TB Joshua: The philanthropist and preacher who suffered rejection until his death
If there was an award for the most vilified Nigerian Pentecostal preacher, Prophet Temitope Balogun ‘TB’ Joshua of the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN) would have won hands down.
Joshua died at 57 on Saturday, June 5, 2021, just a week before his 58th birthday. His death was confirmed by his church in a tweet on Sunday, June 6, 2021.
“God has taken his servant Prophet TB Joshua home – as it should be by divine will,” the church tweeted. “Prophet TB Joshua leaves a legacy of service and sacrifice to God’s kingdom that is living for generations yet unborn.”
His wife, Evelyn told newsmen that she met him “sitting on the chair like someone reflecting but unconscious. I quickly beckoned on his disciples who came and tried to revive him to no avail. Of a truth, he went home to be with the Lord and left us with a message, watch and pray.”
Why he converted his last name Balogun to his middle name remains unclear, but to his friends at AUD Grammar School, Ikare-Akoko, Ondo state, he was Temitope Balogun, a “very quiet, responsible and well-behaved student and a member of the Scripture Union (SU),” Wale Ojo-Lanre a Senior Special Assistant to Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State and former Tourism Editor at the Nigerian Tribune newspaper told Neusroom.com.
Ojo-Lanre was Joshua’s senior at AUD Grammar School in the late 1970s.
Although he didn’t complete his education at AUD before moving to Lagos, Joshua eked out a living evacuating chicken waste in a poultry farm before becoming a pastor.
The preacher, from Arigidi-Akoko in Akoko Northwest local government area of Ondo state, was born June 12, 1963. He founded The Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN) in 1987 when he was 24.
“On the day he was born, while his mother was in labour, a rock from a nearby quarry site went through the roof of the room and fell beside his mother and that was the moment he came out of his mother,” a senior member of his family Solomon Olootu told BBC Yoruba.
His mother Folarin Balogun who came from a Muslim background died as an Alhaja while his father Gabriel Kolawole Balogun worked with the British in Nigeria translating Yoruba to English before his death, according to his biography ‘Revealed! A Complete Revelation Without Humiliation’.
As a student at St Stephen Anglican Primary School in Arigidi, Joshua started exhibiting his love for the Bible with his excellent performance in religious studies.
“It was as if the Bible was the only subject that interested me in primary school. In exams, I scored 99 percent consistently whereas I performed woefully in other subjects,” he told his biographer Dr Femi Success.
At AUD Grammar School, Ojo-Lanre said Joshua was always with his Bible.
“I was his senior but I took interest in him,” Ojo-Lanre says. “I noticed he loved the Bible, while some of us were on the street, he was reserved and always with his Bible. He had something unique in him that distinguished him among other students at that time.”
A wife through a vision
Three years after starting his church in Ikotun, Evelyn, a young lady who visited SCOAN with her sister, became Joshua’s life partner on the first day they met.
Evelyn said barely one hour into her conversation with Joshua, he asked her to marry him and from there their love story started.
Joshua would later claim he had seen a vision before Evelyn’s visit that she was his wife.
They got married in 1990. Although there are multiple claims that the couple have three children, only two are in the public space – Sarah and Promise.
Sarah Joshua, a law graduate of London School of Economics, was called to the Nigerian Bar in 2015 and got married to a Tanzanian in 2021.
His ministry and international network
For more than 30 years, Joshua was one of Africa’s best-known preachers with influence extending beyond the continent. Many of those who have paid tributes to him said he dedicated his life to helping humanity, inspiring and contributing to the successes of many communities, nations, including students, sportsmen, and politicians.
“He touched every part of this world and cannot be treated as a local hero,” Tunde Olanipekun, a Prince in Arigidi-Akoko and a devotee of the Synagogue church since 1994 told Neusroom.
His church in Ikotun, a Lagos suburb, in the Alimosho local government area, was a tourist center of a sort and businesses around the area thrived due to the large number of worshippers from different parts of the world.
In October 2017, Liberia’s President George Weah attended a service at the church in Lagos when he was running for president. His main opposition Senator Yormie Johnson was also at the service on that day.
“The church attracts more than 50,000 worshippers weekly, more than the combined number of visitors to Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London,” a 2013 report by The Guardian UK says.
Ojo-Lanre, a tourism expert, says Joshua was one of the biggest contributors to Nigeria’s economy through religious tourism.
“Nigeria has lost a major revenue generator,” he said. “Joshua was one of the private individuals who generated revenue for Nigeria through religious tourism.”
Religious tourism remains a huge source of revenue for Israel and Saudi Arabia. Israeli’s Tourism Ministry said the country made more than $6 billion from tourism in 2019 while Saudi Arabian authorities said tourism injected $41 billion into the nation’s economy in 2019.
When Joshua announced in 2017 that he was moving his ministry to Israel after he was offered lands by Israeli Mayors, Nigerian tourism experts urged the government to dissuade him from doing so because of its potential impact on the nation’s economy.
Ime Udo, General Secretary of the Nigerian Association of Tour Operators (NANTA) told newsmen in 2017 that Nigeria would lose billions of naira from religious tourism revenue if SCOAN relocates to Israel.
“TB Joshua has the ability to provide any secondary city with the competitive advantage of attracting tourists to a destination,” Unathi Henema, a tourism lecturer at the Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa, wrote in 2017.
A philanthropist yet misunderstood
Joshua’s influence and popularity spread across Africa and the world through his televised healings and miracles. In his later years, he became more prominent as a philanthropist.
In 2017, he donated over N26m towards restoring electricity and putting an end to more than two years of power outage in the four LGAs in the Akoko area of his native Ondo State.
“His philanthropy goes beyond the shores of Nigeria,” Olanipekun says. “He was very kind, especially towards us the aged. Some aged people that have been abandoned in various homes, he fished them out and hired nurses to take care of some of them. He even placed many of them on monthly allowances.”
In Arigidi, he was building a medical college and a prayer mountain that could become another religious tourist centre.
In January 2010 when a devastating earthquake hit Haiti killing more than 300,000 people, and leaving nearly 1.5 million homeless, Joshua sent a team of medical and humanitarian workers to the affected area, and established a field hospital called ‘Clinique Emmanuel’. The footprints of his philanthropy are also in the Philippines, India, Ghana and other countries hit by different natural disasters.
He funded the building and running of a school in Lahore, Pakistan named ‘Emmanuel School’. He also rebuilt a school in a rural area destroyed by the 2016 Ecuador earthquake.
Since his death, many Nigerians have shared stories of how he impacted their lives through.
“He was never a rooftop philanthropist. A rooftop philanthropist will go to the rooftop to announce whatever they give you, but Joshua was never one, that’s why I gave him that appellation,” Ojo-Lanre says.
Joshua took his ministry across Africa, establishing branches in South Africa, Tanzania, Ghana and other countries and through his ministry, he wined and dined with political leaders across Africa.
In 2015 when he arrived in Tanzania for the swearing-in of the president-elect, he was received by the three most prominent men in the country at the time: late President John Magufuli (who was to be sworn-in), outgoing president Jakaya Kikwete and the head of the opposition and former prime minister, Edward Lowassa.
During a visit to South Sudan in November 2019, he was personally received by President Salva Kiir Mayardit.
The cliché that a prophet is not honoured in his hometown may not be totally true about Joshua. In 2008, he was conferred with the Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic (OFR) by the ex-president Umar Yar’Adua’s administration.
Controversies
As his influence grew, he also courted a lot of controversies. In fact, he became more popular for his many controversies.
In the formative days of his ministry, many Pentecostal leaders in Nigeria accused him of exorcism and using diabolical powers to perform miracles. Some of his former associates and disciples who fell out with him also gave credence to these claims.
One of his former disciples, Bisola Johnson published a book ‘The T.B Joshua I Know’ in 2019 where she made several claims accusing Joshua of witchcraft, sexual escapades with minors and other shady acts.
None of these claims was proven beyond just speculations until his death.
Until his death, Joshua and his church remained on the blacklist of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) and the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) who denied him membership.
“We are not taking T.B Joshua but like I said, he too can repent and be converted tomorrow. Then he can say, come check me out and see what I am doing then we can consider accepting him. PFN is for all; nobody is really excluded,” Ayo Oritsejafor, former President of CAN and PFN told journalists in 2009.
Many have argued that the bickering between Joshua and Oristejafor may not be unconnected with the rivalry between the SCOAN founder and Oritsejafor’s mentor, late Bishop Benson Idahosa, founder of Church of God Mission International and one of Nigeria’s foremost Pentecostal preachers.
In the 1990s, Idahosa strongly criticised Joshua and questioned his calling. He then reportedly declared that Joshua would shortly die, it was Idahosa who died soon after the declaration in March 1998, just six months before his 60th birthday.
Asked if he could worship in Joshua’s church, Enoch Adeboye who leads one of Nigeria’s largest Pentecostal movements, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) was also quoted by the Vanguard as saying “No! Definitely not! If he wants me to come and minister in his church, we will sit down; we will discuss the issue of salvation the way I understand it, according to the scriptures.”
In 2010, Joshua was also blacklisted by the Cameroonian government as a ‘son of the devil’ pretending to be ‘a man of God’.
Also prominent among his controversies is the collapse of a guest house within his church premises in Lagos in 2014, leading to the death of 115 people, including 84 South Africans.
In 2016, he was indicted in the Panama papers scandal, the biggest data leak in history which revealed how the world’s rich and famous use offshore companies to shelter their wealth. Aliko Dangote, former South African President Jacob Zuma and many other Africans were indicted in the leak.
Joshua was alleged to have incorporated a company called Chillon Consultancy Limited in the British Virgin Islands on June 20, 2006, along with his wife Evelyn. He denied this claim.
When the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) banned the airing of miracles on television in 2004, Joshua was one of those affected by the directive. His response to the ban was the birth of Emmanuel TV launched in 2006.
Emmanuel TV is one of the most popular Christian TV channels in Africa. In 2015, Google says one of Emmanuel TV’s YouTube videos was the fourth most viewed clip ever within Nigeria.
Despite the rejection from Christian bodies in Nigeria and his many controversies, Joshua was received by political leaders wherever he took his evangelical crusades to.
In 2016, the largest stadium in Peru was filled to capacity when he held a crusade there. Using pop culture parlance, he sold out the stadium.
In his final days, Joshua had begun taking a back seat as a new generation of preachers he had mentored had started taking charge of the church programmes, including preaching and miracle sessions.
Ojo-Lanre described Joshua’s death as “a tragedy to Arigidi and some of us who went to the same school as him and also his followers.”
Olanipekun says “Akoko people will miss him if all the projects he started are not completed.”
The monarch of his hometown, Zaki of Arigidi-Akoko is now advocating that Joshua must not be buried in Lagos and should be buried in Arigidi, the final resting place of his parents.
Joshua’s extended family have now agreed with his wife and children to bury him on the premises of his church in Lagos on July 9, 2021.
