An upcoming investigative documentary by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) consisting of three parts, will chronicle the heinous acts and sexual offences perpetrated by the infamous Pastor Temitope Balogun Joshua, also known as TB. Joshua.
The documentary delves into the clandestine lifestyle of the late SCOAN founder. Abuse, harassment, rape, manipulation, and fake miracles were all covered in detail. According to BBC sources, the church was aware of all the accusations but chose not to investigate. They alleged the sexual crime spanned over two decades.
An additional aspect of the investigation focused on TB Joshua’s treatment and isolation of his daughter whom he had out of wedlock. The 28-year-old Ajoke spoke to the BBC about the day she went to face her father about sexual assault accusations; as a result, the church ostracised her. According to Ajoke, she tried to end her life.
“The disciples dragged me out of the office,” she said, narrating the day she confronted her father. “Put me in a room and isolated me from the rest of the church. I wonder how I lived through that time because they were hitting me with belts, chains… I couldn’t take a shower for days. He was trying so hard to stop people from listening to me. He felt threatened by the fact that I knew what was happening.”
Even though they were aware that their relationship with “daddy” was harmful, survivors of TB Joshua’s sexual exploitation described how he twisted and silenced them. The ladies in question were disciples of TB Joshua. He was accused by many women of sexually abusing and assaulting them. According to one of the ladies who spoke to the BBC, he threatened to subdue the women who first fought against his attack.
There was consensus among the ladies that TB Joshua justified his sexual assaults on them by saying it was for their salvation. When these ladies were adolescents, they became members of the synagogue and stayed for many years. One victim, a lady named Abisola, claimed to have been a member of the church for fourteen years and was raped throughout her stay. The ladies were coerced into having abortions at a an unsanitary clinic located inside the synagogue whenever they became pregnant as a consequence of their many rapes.
“We went into his room and I stood there. He said ‘off your clothes’ so I removed my clothes he just pointed so I lay down and then he raped me. He broke my virginity. I was screaming and he was whispering in my ears that I should stop acting like a baby. I was 17 years old. I was underage,” one of the women said.
One of the survivors confronted TB Joshua after she managed to escape. She filmed the interaction and sent the footage to the BBC. A security guard was heard threatening to open fire on the woman in the footage. Victims recounted being singled out, assaulted, and threatened with gunfire by thugs who were allegedly affiliated with the preacher.
The BBC investigation dug more into the church’s use of stage management and the exaggeration of miracles. According to a person who worked in the miracle department, the message was that people should greatly magnify their difficulties to get healing, and the same went for their healings; the idea was that by doing so, they were letting God perfect the miracles.
“You’ve got this man who positioned himself as a father with many children and went on to rape, abuse, and molest all these people who call him daddy. How is somebody like that permitted to walk free,” Rae asked. Rachel joined the church when she was 17 because she hoped to be cured of homosexuality.
According to Chris Okotie, senior pastor of the Household of God Church International Ministries, the late TB Joshua was a magician who pretended to be a minister of God.
In a viral video, Okotie said the popular Nigerian prophet was never called by God into the gospel ministry.
You may recall that in March 2023, Mail Online reported that an aristocrat, Constance Marten, 35, who ran away for manslaughter was allegedly ‘groomed’ by TB Joshua, the leader of a Nigerian sect as a teenager.
Marten, who spent six months in a compound outside Lagos, Nigeria, as a teenager, was charged with the manslaughter of her baby ‘Victoria’ through severe negligence with her partner Mark Gordon.
There, she was reportedly subjected to some abuses, including starvation, waking up for bible readings, being obliged to call the leader “daddy,” and living in a dormitory with fifty other females under the watchful eye of armed guards.
Marten and Gordon were arrested and detained after a seven-week manhunt for them and their child came to an end, ahead of a hearing at the Old Bailey later in March 2023 about their involvement in Victoria’s death.
It was thought that Marten, whose grandmother was the goddaughter of the late Queen Mother, and who grew up on a £100 million estate in Dorset, went to Nigeria when she was a teenager.
When she was in Lagos, she became a member of the SCOAN or Synagogue of All Nations.
Joe Hurst, a former British soldier who joined the group but left before Marten arrived in 2006, said she spoke to him years later to say she and other white people at the compound were humiliated by the controversial pastor.
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Hurst said she claimed she had been forced to eat Joshua’s leftovers and had been placed in social exile – a punishment given to members who were not ‘focused enough’ on the pastor or who spoke about their lives before entering the compound.
He elaborated by saying that she’d said, “How could God allow this to happen to us?” in response to his account of events at the complex.
While “trying to get her head around what happened to her” and “she was confused and traumatised,” she contacted megachurch author Matthew McNaught years later, according to McNaught’s book.
His YouTube channel, Emmanuel TV, was terminated in April 2021 after he made the controversial allegation that homosexuality was caused by demonic possession.
According to The Sun‘s citation of Marten’s ex-partner Francis Agolo, 44, who said, “She (Marten) would clam up when talking about her time there,” the incident in Nigeria seems to have been “traumatic” for Marten.
He added: “When I knew Constance, she was caring and loving. It seems very out of character.”
Marten had spoken frankly about it in a past interview with Cosmopolitan magazine when she had disclosed that she and fifty other girls lived in a cult’s dormitory.
She added: “The leader looked me in the eye and said, ‘Your family doesn’t matter anymore. “I am now your father.”
The video also showed how SCOAN covered up the 2014 guesthouse disaster from its congregation. Emmanuel TV members saw a brief film of the building with what seemed to be an aircraft swooping over it on many occasions.
According to a source who lost her daughter in the building’s collapse, “on television, they were showing us the building had been bombed” (BBC).
SCOAN is located at Ikotun-Egbe area of Lagos State. The church grew from a local evangelical into a multimillion-dollar church with worshipers from all around the world.
The aircraft story fed to the members was all a lie, Emmanuel, one of the young men who served TB Joshua told the BBC. Emmanuel claimed the church had a structural defect.
The building’s foundation was unsuitable for the floors that were subsequently added to it, as Rae, a disciple confirmed. She went on to say that Joshua, disregarding expert advice, pushed for the building to be elevated.
“They told us don’t tell what you know,” Emmanuel, another worker at SCOAN said in the film. “They knew something was wrong with the building but they were managing it.”
In what the victims’ families saw as “hush money,” SCOAN eventually compensated them monetarily. An individual who was involved in distributing the funds to the relatives of the victims in South Africa talked about how TB Joshua requested that she tell the bereaved families not to talk to the media. Then, according to individuals who spoke with the BBC, Joshua personally threatened families that declined the payment.
“The building collapse is a good example of everyday life under TB Joshua. It is just a series of cover-ups. It is just this was so big it was almost impossible for him to make it go away,” Rae said.
According to the BBC, to preserve the church’s reputation and TB Joshua’s reputation, the truth of the catastrophe was covered up by transferring dead and dismembered corpses in SCOAN ambulances from beneath the debris.
