There is no defending TB Joshua

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.

That is the historical lesson that eludes Joshua’s defenders who are approaching this with blind defensiveness. Coming to terms with the fact that your religious system bred a cult of personality that destroyed the people who sought life in the church is no “attack on Joshua’s legacies” as some of you have been parroting like hand-wound dolls. It is accountability. There is no religious organisation in the world run directly by God; they are all administered by fallible humans. If you cannot accept that they sometimes need correcting, you have fallen into the sin of idolatry.

While watching Disciples, what was topmost on my mind was what justice would look like now that the alleged main culprit was dead. Unfortunately, a charismatic denomination like the SCOAN church is its own leadership; there is no recourse to a higher bureaucratic authority to act on behalf of the survivors. From the disciples’ narration, Joshua had a God complex. How do you censure a man who was not accountable to anyone? It does not help that he is now dead. It is also uncertain that the Nigerian government will take any action on this. While he was alive, they let him escape the consequences for his church building that collapsed and killed 116 people. The blood had not dried at the site before President Goodluck Jonathan flew to Lagos to condole with him, a man who was not even hurt by his own actions. Will they also let him escape reckoning even in death? The survivors should collectively sue his estate for billions of naira in damages.

Overall, kudos to BBC Africa for Disciples. While we have had several cases of religious cult leaders whose house of lies unravelled after their respective deaths (think Jesu Oyingbo, Olumba Olumba etc.), this is about the first time a media house would embark on a transnational expose. This must have been a challenge for them to pull off. I know because I tried to write an academic essay on the Joshua phenomenon after his demise. 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.

By the time he died, he had become one of the most intriguing figures in contemporary Christianity and a highly influential African. During visits to some African countries, each time I was introduced as a Nigerian, someone would ask me about “TB Joshua.” There was no denying his influence. He was also quite innovative, constantly evolving methods that other pastors—within the competitive Nigerian religious space—had to copy. I wanted to understand how that happened.

Even though we met some people who were at his church at the inception and had some very interesting things to say, they did not want to go on record probably because of the likely blowback. I had to set the work aside. Disciples answered some of those questions for me, but it still left me with questions of how he became that monster. How exactly did an unlettered man from a provincial Nigerian town become so powerful that even presidents submitted before him? Without some clarity on his methods and how he acquired his tactics, people (including the survivors) still believe he had spiritual power. Unfortunately, what they took as diabolism and supernatural power on the part of Joshua were symbolic manipulation, classic psychological conditioning, and time-tested techniques of torture, manipulation, and coercion.

While he preyed on his disciples in private, he managed to maintain a genial public front. He was a man who understood what society considered authentic and engineered it accordingly. For the white people that thronged his church and turned Nigeria into a religious tourism hotspot, his rawness signified an unvarnished religious truth that the well-educated and smooth-speaking Nigerian pastors in tailored suits could not muster. As also a black man—which, in the white imagination has a natural animistic predisposition and closer supernatural contacts—his crudity symbolised a departure from their over-polished modern life. Joshua saw their neediness, and he used it to subjectify them.

For Nigerians, he also understood our colomental tendency to associate the white skin with superiority, rationality, and elevated consciousness and took advantage of that cultural attitude. From his vantage point between the races and their respective cultural psychologies, he mediated and manipulated all sides’ assumptions of him with the theatrics that allowed him escape justice.