TB Joshua, a Nigerian pastor, exploited followers through fake miracles, sexual abuse, and forced abortions within his Scone compound while leveraging government bribery. He circumvented a 2004 ban on unverified miracle videos by pivoting to digital platforms like Emmanuel TV, expanding globally despite selling fraudulent cures for AIDS and Ebola that caused a fatal stampede in Ghana. His wealth, estimated at $15 million plus a $60 million private jet, fueled a collapse of his own building in 2014 that killed 116 people; he allegedly blocked rescue efforts and blamed Boko Haram before dying in 2021, leaving his legacy marred by tragedy and deception. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about illness by the sickest man in podcasting, Robert Evans.
We're recording this about a week after our TB Joshua Part 1 episodes with the great Miles Gray.
Miles, take an audio bow.
Wow.
What a bow.
Beautiful.
I butted my microphone.
I'm technically better, I guess.
I have this fun thing that happens with sinus infections where my nose is mostly better, but now my jaw hurts like hell.
It's like a, I think it's partly related to coughing, but it happens when you're, with, when your sinuses get completely fucked.
So I'm feeling great, Miles.
How are you?
Did you try that colloidal silver?
I sent you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm always putting silver in various parts of the world.
Sorry, did you watch that documentary, Miles?
Mother God.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, you got any time.
My favorite thing is people taking quack medicine that turns them different colors.
Because that's, it's so good.
Every time it's funny.
It's like, it's fucked up, but like, I was taking so many screenshots when I was watching that that I use as memes among my friends.
Like just this one where the guy was playing guitar while she was in the bed.
Yeah.
Just like the energy of playing guitar for a corpse like that.
You're like, oh, this is what it is.
I quite literally forced Jamie to watch that all the way through in the middle of the night.
I was like, I was like, I can't be awake tomorrow and you have not watched this for me to talk to you about this shit.
It was miles.
When they were wheeling her through that, the whole thing was out of whatever.
Anyway, it was great because it led me after, I was watching that with friends.
And afterwards, we were very much like, well, I still want more cult content.
And we found fucking, I think it was Netflix we were on.
I forget whatever thing we were on.
The algorithm was like HBO.
It was HBO.
Here's a show about like this commune that might be a cult or might not.
It was like a mystery show.
I put it on in the first episode.
Feels kind of like a documentary.
There are a couple of weird moments, and I'm like, what's going on with this?
And then the second episode, it immediately transitions to being a reality show fully.
And I was like, they fucking tricked us.
They tricked us into thinking that we were watching a documentary about this commune that got accused of being a cult.
And it's just a reality show where people have to live on a commune.
Right.
And I was like, you tricky sons of bitches.
This is horseshit.
This country is chicken shit.
This fucking country.
Horrible.
Speaking of this country, you know what's not this country, Miles?
Where?
Nigeria.
Yes.
Yeah.
You know, I'm not an expert on Nigeria, but most of my research suggests different country than we live in.
It was seen, to be honest.
Thank you.
I thought it was good.
It connected with the main thought, which was it's not this country.
Yeah, it's not this country, but it is where TB Joshua lived.
And most great cult leaders, Miles, have a title or an alternate name they prefer to be known by.
I'm not going to say every cult leader, but a lot of them do, right?
L. Ron Hubbard was the Commodore because he loved navies and making people pretend to be in his navy.
Keith Ranieri was known as Vanguard to his followers.
I had a Beyoncé joke in here, but I really like, why would I that?
I don't need that kind of thing.
How did you just pronounce her name?
We're going to bleep it out anyway, like they did in that Donald Glover show, Sophie.
So it's fine.
Right.
So, in keeping with the fact that he was a general creeping monster, TB Joshua had the most unsettling cult leader nickname imaginable: Daddy.
That's just, that's the good stuff.
Not like father sometimes, too, but like daddy specifically is what most of his followers refer to him as, which is just an extra level.
I don't know why it's worse than father.
I guess it's not maybe it's just like exposure because of the Catholic Church.
We're all used to religious figures being father, but like daddy is creepy, right?
No, daddy is because it's like it's juvenile, but also there's it's sexually charged in different contexts.
Yeah.
And I mean, and it is in this context because like the people who he was most insistent call him daddy were the young female followers that he was fucking right.
Why did for a second?
I forgot I was on behind the bastards and I was like, oh, finally said, chill.
We're just like, we're just going to talk about mother god.
And then I'm like, oh, that's right.
We're talking about TB fucking Joshua again.
Wait a fucking.
I thought I was watching a Netflix documentary about a cult and now I'm on a fucking reality show.
That's such a fun cult documentary because like it's, I mean, it's a story about a woman destroying herself and like dying, but she's also the cult leader.
And it's like interesting because it's a cult leader where the primary victim was the cult leader.
Yeah.
Like the cult leader was the victim of the cult in a way that's really fun.
Yeah.
As opposed to this, which is just horrible.
But you know, this is, yeah, we're not going to give you the fun story.
You're not going to hear about Mother God here.
Go watch HBO if you want to.
Is there colloidal silver at the very least in this one?
There is quack remedies, but those quack remedies are just praying until your cancer eats you alive.
Okay.
All right.
Yep.
So I'm still stuff.
Despite that, I'm still in.
Yeah.
You're contractually obligated to be in.
We have ironclad contracts with our guests.
Hey, don't reveal the process here.
I know I'm locked in to at least 2026.
We're represented by one of those Epstein lawyers, and it's just anyway.
Speaking of abusive relationships, let's talk about the tale of one of TB Joshua's followers, Ray.
Ray is an English woman.
She left Brighton, England, where she went to university for Nigeria in the winter of 2002.
She traveled there with a friend to see TB Joshua.
Now, both Ray and her friend were strict Christians who had seen videos of TB Joshua's miracles passed around in tapes and heard stories from other evangelicals who'd gone to his church, right?
Again, as you noted, it's very much like, I don't know, the way that like, you know, back in the early aughts, late 90s, like punk bands, you'd get like some burnt, like you'd get like a tape or something from a friend of yours, right?
It's like a live session from this band no one else has ever heard of.
And that's how that shit spread.
It's the same way with this.
And in Ray's accounting, she watched these videos for the first time with her church congregation when she was 16.
So a couple of years before she went over there.
And quote, the whole room went completely still when they first watched TB Joshua cure people.
Now, it's one thing to say these people were convinced that TB Joshua could work miracles and wanted to see that for themselves.
But that doesn't get at the essential horror of what was going on here.
Ray, like a lot of TB Joshua's foreign volunteers, was homosexual.
And because of the religious environment she was raised in and the time, again, you got to remember this is the early 2000s.
We're in a very different period for a lot of this stuff.
She believed that this was immoral and she wanted to pray the gay away, right?
Like that was her, like she recognized this about her.
She's raised in this culture and she wants to be cured of this.
And whatever she's doing at home is not getting rid of this thing that is part of her, right?
Right.
And she sees these videos of this supernaturally powerful preacher in Nigeria and is like, maybe he can do it, right?
I'm seeing like, right, you know, if he's like fixing this guy's like leg or whatever other snake oil shit we saw last time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And obviously that doesn't work, but you can see why she would get hope for this for the first time, right?
As a result of like watching these videos.
Ray later told an interviewer, I thought, well, maybe this is the answer to my problems.
Maybe this man can straighten me out.
Like if he prays for me, I won't be gay anymore.
And so after she and her friend went and visited Scone for a week, her friend goes back to the UK, but Ray elects to stay, to like drop out of school, to basically leave her family and to join his church.
She recalls thinking, this is what Jesus would have done.
An article published based on a BBC Africa Eye report states, neither Ray nor many of the young people who left their home countries to meet Joshua in the early 2000s paid for their tickets.
Church groups across England raised funds to send pilgrims to Lagos to witness these miracles.
And Joshua contributed Scone money himself, senior former church insider say.
Later, once the church was well established, he charged high prices for pilgrims to come and stay.
So it's really like a bait and switch type thing, right?
Like we'll put money into bringing people over here until we've established demand in the industry because there's so many people coming back home.
He's a good businessman, right?
Evil, evil businessman, but most good businessmen are evil.
Yeah, there's no, yeah, you can't make the line go up unless you have truly despicable names or you're just like, no, I'm just, I'm just good at, you know, getting the people here and making the money.
And the line is going up for Scone.
Yeah.
Bissola, a Nigerian woman who spent 14 years inside the Scone compound, says that courting Westerners was a key tactic.
Quote, he used white people to market his brand.
And it's worth noting that miracles were also marketed, as we've said, to other Africans and that TB Joshua was an equal opportunity abuser, but the abuse looked different depending on where you were coming from.
And this brings us to how he treated members of the Nigerian LGBTQ community.
And I'm going to quote from an article by Open Democracy here.
Hans Leene Davids, who works with the Inclusive and Affirming Ministries, IAM, a pan-African network that champions LGBTIQ rights and religious organizations, says that Joshua promotes the notion that LGBTIQ people are bad spirits blocking prosperity.
Parents from poor communities bring their children that are LGBTIQ'd identifying to Joshua's services in the hope that their bad omen child will be turned into something good and they will start to have good luck and prosperity, says Davids, who is a former reverend with the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa.
And so, again, for kids like Ray, the preach is that like this can fix you.
This guy is so much more powerful than any of the religious leaders you've seen in your country and he can actually fix you where they can't.
And when they're talking to like, when he's sort of like preaching to queer Nigerians, what he's saying is that like, if you send your kids here for me to fix them, the bad luck that your family has incurred because you have a gay child in the family will be wiped away and your family will start making more money, right?
Like that's literally the pitch.
Yeah.
And both of those things are evil.
They're just a bit different, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're just using different motivators to get people there.
Right.
And it showcases that this is someone with a pretty keen understanding of both cultures.
He understands Western, the Western cultures that he's recruiting from and he understands like his own community, right?
And that different approaches are going to work better.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, this gets us to another interesting difference between, or sorry, and I think like it's kind of key to note that when it comes to how he preached to poor Nigerians, to Ghanians, to peoples in West Africa, and largely the people he is recruiting from there, not exclusively, but a lot of them are very poor.
He focuses on prosperity, right?
And not just in terms of like promising that if you come to the church, if you send him your kids for him to fix them, your family will be prosperous.
But he does this sort of thing that's very common in the U.S. among prosperity gospel churches, where you have to tithe a huge chunk of your income.
He asks for 10% from the incomes of all of his church members.
And that will ensure that God blesses your finances.
So the way this is, and again, a lot of this is prosperity gospel shit.
You get this in the U.S. all the time.
You have to give money to the church, but that's how you guarantee God will increase your income, right?
Like that's the only way for you to make more money.
I'm one of God's official agents, man.
So here's the deal.
Give me about like 10, give me a 10% cut of your shit.
I'll fucking tell God, yo, make sure you hook them up this month.
And we're good.
We're good.
So over the first 20 or so years of operations, Scone perfected the practice of reaching out to people in different ways.
And of course, the practice of faking miracles.
And this is what all of these tactics rely upon is faking miracles.
Witnesses have claimed to press that not only were some miracle recipients actors, as we've already discussed, but it was also common practice to trick actual sick people into playing their part.
TB Joshua's agents would comb lagos for people with health problems that were easily treated, but like these people couldn't afford to treat those health problems, right?
So it's, you've got some sort of, you know, bacterial sickness or whatever, a virus even that we can treat.
You just can't afford to treat it.
These people would be brought in and then in the food or water they're being given, they would be drugged and treated against their knowledge and told that what was fixing them was them being prayed over, right?
They were gaslighting people into believing that they had been cured.
So like someone like has some kind of like maybe like parasitic infection or something like that.
And they're like, dude, just fucking hit them with the antibiotics in their fucking yogurt.
And then, you know, because of, you know, the water, the lack of good water in a lot of, especially these poor communities, there are a lot of people with parasitical.
And with that sort of shit, with at least certain sorts of like intestinal parasites, once you get people good medicine, the degree to which people like improve is, it does feel magical if you like, you don't know what's being done, right?
Right.
Like it's such a quick change.
And yeah, it's, I've never heard of anyone doing that.
And it's like, I guess objectively, it's better than the other thing he's doing, which is like lying to people about the fact that he can cure their cancer.
Yeah, like HIV.
They're like, yo, don't do the meds.
Just pray.
Just pray.
This is, I get, I don't know why it disturbs me more because it's objectively not as bad, but it is like weirdly more fucky.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Because you're completely, you're using their own distress over their health.
to then like supercharge your shitty belief factory to then be like, yeah, man, I'm going to take your stress about this and I'm going to convert that into just devotion to what I'm telling you and staying in line and promoting my message all the while when it's like, yeah, I just gave you fucking amoxicillin or whatever.
Yeah, right?
Yeah.
Or literally like ivermectin.
I'm sure that is like what they're giving them a lot of times because it's an effective anti-parasitic.
Yeah, also for COVID.
Yeah.
And also for, of course, here's COVID.
Collidal silver too.
Yeah.
That's my combo.
I just, you know, Miles, I just take silver when if I start to feel under the weather, I keep a pile of silver in my gun safe and I just eat one of those little silver bars, you know?
Yeah.
It's like a extended release capsule.
But yeah, sure.
He's eating silver bullets.
No, I need those for werewolves, Miles.
Yeah, that's true.
I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to spread this information on the show.
It gets a lot worse somehow.
So I mentioned last episode that given Nigeria's problems with HIV, a lot of T.B. Joshua's claimed miracles had to do with curing people of that illness.
Here's the thing.
It's actually kind of hard to convince someone who is dying of AIDS that you have fixed them, right?
Because they continue to be really sick.
Comprehensively Evil Cult Tactics00:03:24
So they opted to go.
And obviously, like HIV and AIDS are not the same thing, but someone who is untreated HIV, it will eventually progress and become clear that they have not become cured.
And that's a potential danger, right?
If people do eventually realize that you were lying to them, they could, you know, speak out about it and cause problems.
So the much safer thing that the church eventually lands on is bribing doctors to tell congregants that they've tested positive for HIV and then curing them, having them go get a real HIV test at an actual clinic and it comes back negative because they were not sick.
Fuck out of here.
I know, right?
That's so fucking evil.
Holy shit.
Jesus.
This is such a different kind of bastard.
You know, like the past, we've talked about all kinds of Nazis, child abusers, just general head kids.
This guy is just completely fucking with people's realities in a way that's A, just, it's like, it's, I hate using the word, but it's like genius.
It is.
It's, it's, and it's fucking, it's fucking with me that like, he's like, no, this is what you got to do.
You get the people who don't have AIDS, get them to pop on a fucking fake test.
Then you go take the real thing.
And then guess what?
We fucking won.
But it feels like also something like how probably like finance works at higher levels too.
You know what I mean?
Of this same thing of like, no, just make it look like this and then watch, watch.
I think it's key to understand stuff like this because it's so easy, especially when people talk about cults like this that are operating in like Nigeria for folks to have the wrong idea that like, well, you know, maybe these people are not like, are getting tricked or something because they lack access to education that people have.
And I would hope that the degree of misinformation around shit like COVID in the U.S. would disabuse you of that.
Like it's not, it has very little to do with your level of education.
In this case, it's even less because you're dealing with people who probably can't afford a lot of medical care.
And so the church says, as churches often do legitimately all throughout the world, we are offering medical tests to see if you have HIV or whatever.
People who do not have access to much money go and get the test.
It tells them they're sick.
They get cured, so they think, by, you know, by TB Joshua, and then they become dedicated members of the church and give them what little money they have.
You know, and like, what other options do a lot of these people have, right?
You know, like, yeah, that's an insane thing to have to deal with.
Yeah, that's what makes it, I guess, yeah, just doubly vile because you're already, you're already taking advantage of the inequity that exists within your country to then be like, let me just exacerbate this even more.
Yeah, it's like one of the most comprehensively evil things I've ever heard of someone doing.
It's pretty bad.
Yeah.
But you know what isn't comprehensively evil, Miles.
It's just a little evil.
Tell me.
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Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
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Clayton Eckard's Paternity Scandal00:02:33
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City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
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Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
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And an outsider with a secret.
He allegedly a victim of flat down.
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That may have been about sex.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
Dating a Prolific Con Artist00:14:59
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Ah, we're back.
So put up against all of this perfectly managed spectacle, confused young people in their teens and 20s who'd already bought into a fundamentally delusional strain of a miracle-ridden chunk of the faith had no defense.
And I'm speaking about the Westerners here primarily.
I want to quote again from the BBC discussing the story of our friend Ray.
When Ray landed in the seething heat of Lagos, she saw miracles too.
Dozens of people came and testified to having been healed of serious illnesses.
I had a really involuntary reaction.
I just broke down in floods of tears, she said.
It was then that Ray was chosen.
Joshua singled her out to become a disciple, an elite group of followers who served him and lived with him inside his compound.
Ray thought she was going to study under Joshua to cure her sexuality, to learn how to heal people.
The reality was very different.
We all thought we were in heaven, but we were in hell, she says.
And in hell, terrible things happen.
TB Joshua sexually abused Ray, and not just her, but numerous other disciples.
That was largely the point of being at least the female disciples.
The male disciples got abused too, but I think it was more like literally just getting physically beaten and tortured and shit when they didn't, you know, do things because he was, you know, he's an abusive asshole, right?
In addition to being just a calculated evil.
We don't know how many of these women there were, at least dozens.
Most of the people who were inside and have gotten out suspect that the number of women he sexually abused is in the hundreds.
I mean, it could be higher than that.
Like this guy was in power and wealthy for a long time and had access to a lot of people.
By this point, the early aughts, the synagogue church of all nations had expanded into a compound of several full city blocks wide with massive towers of apartment buildings, a grand stadium capable of hosting tens of thousands of worshipers, schools, shops, and theaters.
It was effectively a city within a city.
The women chosen by Joshua were isolated, locked away from friends or family, and from each other.
They were often kept in total isolation, right?
Locked in individual cells, effectively.
Ray claims that she believed firmly she was the only disciple in a romantic relationship with TB Joshua, and so great was his control.
And I mean, that's how she described it.
I don't think romantic would be the right way to actually describe this, but at the time, that was how she was looking at it, right?
She also claims that his control was so great that he was able to make it impossible for most of the women he was abusing to know that other women were being abused, right?
This is something you'll hear from a few of his victims, so it seems to be probably pretty consistent.
Joshua, like most cult leaders, was not a big fan of condoms.
And as a result, a lot of the women that he slept with wound up pregnant, often repeatedly.
Dozens of women have claimed to the BBC that they were forced to have abortions by T.B. Joshua, who seems to have had no desire himself to father multiple children.
He does have some kids, but most of the time, he seems to have just ordered these women to get abortions.
One of his former victims told an interviewer, if any of us got pregnant, he said, you cannot betray the man of God.
We have to do something about it.
I never had a choice whether I could keep a potential child or not.
I felt like I didn't own my body.
And for an idea of how prevalent this was, how consistent a thing this was for him, T.B. Joshua's evangelical Christian compound had a secret on-site abortion clinic just to service his victims.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
A seat.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He has like an underground abortion clinic in this like little city that he's built just for his victims.
Right.
And all the money that he's he's raking in just goes to creating this like bubbled reality city to do this kind of shit in.
Yeah, where he exercises total control.
And when I say abortion clinic, don't picture a clean, competent Planned Parenthood facility.
T.B. Joshua is still an evangelical Pentecostal and believes that abortion is wrong.
But he primarily seems to have believed that it was wrong for the women that he was assaulting to get pregnant at all.
Right.
And thus he saw the procedure not just as necessary for his own benefit, but as a punishment for them.
Right.
Holy shit.
Like because they like, how dare you get pregnant after no like unprotected sex.
Yeah.
I am, I am like God's prophet and there's nothing more important than my work and you're putting it at risk with your selfish decision to get pregnant.
That seems to be, from the way they talk about it, that seems to be how he treated this.
Okay.
Jessica Camu, who is one of his African victims, she's from Namibia, says that she was taken by Joshua at age 17, raped and locked away to what amounted to a dungeon.
He kept her there for five years and forced her to have as many abortions over the years.
Quote, these were backdoor type medical treatments that we were going through.
It could have killed us.
Another follower went into more detail.
You know it.
You skip your first period, you skip your second period, and you have to talk in secrecy.
You'd be taken by one of these elder moms to this clinic of his.
He's referring to part of the facilitation process that this whole cult runs by is he's got some of these elder women who do a lot of the work of handling the younger women that he's abusing.
Right.
Because he's not going to do that himself, right?
He's got cult leadership to do.
He has more important things to handle.
Yeah.
He's taking medical diagnoses.
Yeah, right.
T.B. Joshua had a ferocious temper, probably not surprising.
And the man his followers called daddy was prone to fly into rages at the drop of a hat.
The most severe punishment he meted out was forced isolation because that's pretty close to the worst thing you can do to somebody.
And this was often prescribed for the women he had he was abusing.
Ray says that she was locked alone in a room at one point for two years and was visited only by T.B. Joshua for reasons I probably don't need to explain.
She attempted suicide several times while imprisoned in the compound.
But again, that's not easy to do because of the degree of control he has.
Yeah, like I said, this is one of the worst stories I've ever come across.
And it sure is.
And like it has, it's like any conceivable way to be a despicable person.
He's like, oh, yeah, yeah.
Like I'm engaged in that too.
Yeah.
Imprisonment, trafficking, a sexual assault, sexual violence, medical gaslighting, like fucking literally anything.
Yeah.
Like, I don't want to say, you know, when you're talking about like really bad cult leaders, it's making like a moral distinction.
Like this one was worse than this one.
Yeah.
I've never been more disturbed by a cult story than this.
This is like the most unsettling cult shit I've ever read about, I think.
Yeah.
And someone who's like, cause a lot of the times it's like, it's just like a unwell narcissist with like great charisma who's like racist.
Yeah.
And then this guy is so deeply thinking about the myriad of ways he can control and abuse people.
Yeah.
That's when you're like, yeah, it's like it's a completely different level or not a different level, but it's just a different level of severity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
More common punishments were meted out to regular followers of the prophets, people that he's not having sex with, right?
These would include whipping with chains or horse whips, the use of electrical cables to whip people for punishment.
And of course, it was also just, there was a level of average abuse that all of the people who lived on Scone property were forced to go through.
Everyone living on this compound is made to wake up early and go to sleep very late.
They are often forced into physical labor.
All of these buildings, which are massive constructions, are built by his followers who are living on site, at least as much as possible.
I'm sure they had to pull in contractors for some stuff.
But he's, and the reason he's doing this, and this is normal cult stuff, right?
You keep everyone sleep deprived because that reduces their general level of defense, you know?
It's a pretty common cult tactic.
Men were also given roles as his close disciples, and they were used to abuse women and other men.
You know, it's a lot of the men who are his enforcers who are doing these physical punishments, but they were also comprehensively abused as well.
As this passage from one of the BBC's investigations makes clear.
Former disciple Giles Hearst, 31, says at first that he was love-bombed, a term that can be used to describe when culture groups shower a recruit with love and accolades to get them to join.
But when he became a disciple, Hearst said he saw the other side.
Competition was fierce among the 200 or so disciples for Joshua's attention, and they were encouraged to report each other for behaviors deemed wrong, he said.
Sins are confessed in front of others, recorded and archived, according to Hearst and other former disciples.
Passports are taken, along with novels and any medications, including mild painkillers or malaria pills.
Permission from Joshua in the form of a signed pass is needed just to make a phone call or email, Hearst said.
So again, that kind of speaks to the overall level of control that everyone's under in like kind of the central part of the compound where he's got his closest followers.
Is there how many people like lived in that city?
It's really unclear to me, at least hundreds.
I think it fluctuates over time, in part because the amount of facilities available.
And it's like an onion, right?
You've got this kind of in the area closest to him living around him in like the most secure facilities, a couple hundred people.
You've got some less secure facilities where people are under less control and you have a larger number of them.
And you have a much larger number of people who are coming into the ceremonies, who are probably volunteering their time, who are certainly tithing money, but they live outside of the property.
And to them, it maybe doesn't feel like, and maybe it just does kind of feel like a normal church that you give money to and you volunteer at, you know?
Right.
That's certainly the way it feels for the majority of people, I think, who are contributing to this.
You know, the number of people, it's a cult, but it's not recognizable as being in a cult to the majority of people who are aware of TB Joshua and think that he's a man of God.
Right.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Because like, why would you, there's no need to have tens of thousands of people in that kind of control.
You don't have that kind of time, you know?
Like, why would you?
I don't have any fake COVID tests.
I can give you a cool.
Yeah, exactly.
That's just exhausting.
Obviously, this is only possible because the Nigerian government was a full patsy to TB Joshua's activities.
The amount of money he brought into the country was seen as worth whatever harm he did.
Immigration officials even acted to smooth the passage and long-term visas of Westerners who came to join his church.
There was effectively an accelerated entry program into the country just for TB Joshua followers.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You get like your visa extra fast if you're coming in, you know, because they know the officials in Lagos, number one, they're getting paid directly, and they also know these people are bringing money into the country.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, it's not like we're just getting bribed.
It's like there is a tangible effect on the economy.
So yeah, this is a benefit for like the country, you know?
Two wrongs do make a right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That's our law.
As a result of this situation, speaking out against Scone was dangerous, you know, because the authorities are on their side.
It was not until the BBC Open Democracy Joint Report published in January of 2024 as both a series of articles and a documentary that any of this information came out.
In one of many articles on the subject, the BBC notes, a number of our witnesses in Nigeria claim they were physically attacked and in one case shot at after previously speaking out against the abuse and posting videos containing allegations on YouTube.
A BBC crew that attempted to record footage of the church's Lagos compound from a public street in March 2022 was also fired at by the church's security and was detained for a number of hours.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
The state's involvement is only just insofar, like, it's just because of the bribes that they're looking the other way or are other people like entwined, like, you know, part of the power.
I think it's probably more than just bribes.
I would be surprised if no one was entwined.
I would surprise if he, I'd be surprised if he wasn't kicking other benefits too to some people, you know?
Right, right, right.
I don't know that we have like a perfect context for precisely how the relationship worked.
Yeah.
But it's clear that they were like, no, we, we like, we like tuberculosis, Joshua.
Yeah.
Old tuberculosis, Joe.
So the sheer volume of rapes and the abortions that came with them, along with the physical and psychological abuse of disciples, created the potential for legal consequences.
And so, yeah, TB Joshua, he's got to maintain control locally through bribery.
But it's also kind of worth noting that since so many of his victims are Westerners, there is this risk that international condemnation might erupt, right?
You know, because you can't, you can't bribe every government that some you've got followers on.
And theoretically, they're going to get concerned when they realize like, wow, a lot of people have left our country and live with this guy.
And seems like they've been.
And the ones that come back are describing hell.
Yeah.
And so how he would shield himself from this was with the use of charities.
Prior to his death in 2021, any article about TB Joshua, incredible outlets would note that he was controversial and they'd talk about some of these allegations against him.
But then they would be like, well, he also puts a lot of money into good causes.
And maybe so he's, maybe he's faking miracles.
I think based on a lot of the articles I read prior to this, I think how you might have interpreted this guy prior to this BBC Open Democracy report is he's faking a lot of miracles and he's kind of a fraud, but he's he's committing that fraud to get money that he then puts into really useful charities around the world.
So like, it's kind of unethical, but the ends are good.
And I want to quit, there's a segment I've got from a Daily Mail article that's a decent example of this.
Followers are expected to give about 10% of their paychecks and the payments are monitored and people are ranked and seated accordingly.
T-shirts, books and frames and photos promoting Joshua are also for sale.
However, even former disciples agree that Joshua himself does give a lot of money to charity and in scholarships.
Joshua defended his church's resources.
Without material and money, I wouldn't be able to carry out so much huge, huge, huge people come here for support, Joshua said.
So that kind of gives you the idea of how this is sort of justified.
And, you know, that's bad.
He's like, it's just like, fuck, man, this guy takes like the learnings from so many predatory companies, industries, states, whatever.
Like the whole thing of like how like BP is like, and that's why we're investing in like renewable blah, blah, blah.
Right.
Right.
He's doing a chevron here.
Dude, what are you talking about?
We're fucking the earth.
I just told you we just put up like seven fucking windmills in fucking Indiana, man.
Ebola Cures and Anointing Water00:15:59
What the fuck, dude?
This isn't, why are you fucking with me?
Part of what's frustrating about this guy's early life is it's such a black box.
I am really curious, how much access did this guy have to like the internet?
Did he spend a lot of time in libraries?
Like, what was his studying?
What was the process of, because this is the complexity of how he kept this all going speaks to somebody who did read really widely, right?
It'd be weird if he just came up with all of this on his own rather than being inspired by other abusive organizations doing similar things.
Right.
I mean, you know, it's not a lot of foreign companies operate in Nigeria.
So I'm sure his first interaction is seeing how Western companies operate in West Africa.
Yeah.
And, you know, like he probably took a couple lessons from Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum and was like, oh, okay.
I see how y'all do.
Okay.
I might be able to use some of that in some of my shit.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just like, I think it's sort of like a game recognized game in like a fucked up, demonic, predatory way.
Yeah.
Like, oh, I'll take a little bit of that.
I'll take a little bit of this.
Yeah.
It's good stuff.
So former high-ranking followers alleged that this was part of a concerted plan to protect himself by making any attack against him look like something that would threaten money that was helping suffering people all around Africa.
So basically, the question they're asking people, having people ask themselves, is, is going after T.B. Joshua for a little bit of being a con artist worth hurting all of these people, right?
How else are they going to get the money?
Right.
Now, this didn't always work.
And so T.B. Joshua's first line of defense was something he cribbed from a character in his favorite book, the Bible.
On his compound, he constructed what amounted to his own personal hell, a high-rise living structure that could fit hundreds of worshipers.
And again, this is where they've got these like punishment cells where he can lock people for behaving badly.
And I want to play you a clip from that BBC documentary with his followers talking about how this place is run.
There was a system in there that he used to abuse these women.
He's going to inside the building of his apartment.
He designed it.
God.
The whole building was just designed to keep secret.
Multiple doors, multiple entries and exits.
The staircase you can use to get to his five-story was like four.
I call a lady.
Prophet wants to see you.
He would tell you the specific staircase that this person should come.
He would always tell you which entrance to take, which door to get into.
He can ask the ladies to come through any of the door.
So people don't see them.
He would always ask you when you come, did anybody see you?
You'd be like, no, sir.
Then you rape me again.
It was a process, a very nasty cycle.
We couldn't see it right under our nose.
He designed a system for deceiving all of us disciples.
A lot of women were being abused by this man.
I had no idea.
I thought I was the only one.
I didn't know that that thing had happened to anybody else.
So that's pretty bad.
Yeah.
The guards who are running this harem prison were often teenagers themselves.
They're said to have often been like boys who are 16, 17, 15 years old.
So they are, again, both victims because they're subject to discipline and beatings themselves, but they're also being used to facilitate this abusive system in part because they're younger and easier for him to influence, right?
One of these boys, after leaving, told the BBC that TB Joshua usually raped four to five women each week, sometimes more.
Former church officials, the highest number of estimates that you can find are like in the thousands of victims over the years that he was doing this.
So really just like a kind of incomprehensible scale.
Right.
Yeah.
The fact that the root of TB Joshua's recruiting power are these miracles forced some action from Nigerian regulators.
Again, the Nigerian government's not a monolith.
There's a huge amount of corruption, which is how he gets away with this.
But he is constantly subject to resistance, not just in the government, but from other Pentecostal leaders in Nigeria who don't know all of this.
They don't know the extent of what he's doing, but they know that he's a family.
They just know there's just a bullshit artist.
And that's what I see.
Yes.
And probably, I'm sure they had some idea that there was more going on, right?
Yeah.
But certainly we're not aware of like the full dimensions of it.
But there was resistance.
And this kind of culminated in 2004 in the Nigerian National Broadcasting Commission officially banning the airing of videos about miracles that could not be verified, right?
So you can't publish on television unverified miracles.
Now, what does it mean to verify a miracle?
I was going to say.
You get a blue check on your shit.
This is a verified miracle.
Yeah, I don't know precisely what that would mean.
I haven't found good explanations to like what kind of process they might have had for verifying miracles.
Right.
We'll get to the primary way of works.
It doesn't wind up functioning to actually stop him from putting out these miracle videos.
It just changes the way he's going to do it.
Right.
Oh, right.
And it's interesting.
I read some articles about sort of the reaction of the Pentecostal community in Nigeria to this law banning video miracles.
There's not as much comprehensively like negative reaction to it as I would have expected.
The Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, or PFN, who had long made it clear that they did not consider TB Joshua to be a legitimate pastor, supported the ban, arguing we don't harbor bastards in our fold, people who have failed in other businesses and who see the church as a better option, which is a respectable stance.
For his part, TB Joshua claimed in public that he was the target of the ban.
And I think this is true.
I do, in fact, think he was the target of this ban.
And I should also say, all of these pastors who are supporting the ban and who are against TB Joshua, some of them are legitimately decent people.
Some of them are just protecting their own business interests, right?
That's also a factor here.
Yeah, right, right.
I found one quote from a contemporary article on the bill attributed to a pastor.
And it does seem to be an only slightly veiled attack on TB Joshua.
Quote, according to him, the nation has reached the level where people now have billboards with messages like, come for treatment of all blood diseases.
That is unethical.
That is unhealthy.
And that is ungodly, he said, adding, I think probably the fear we have is that they shouldn't have a carpet ban.
Jesus said we should allow the chaff to grow with the wheat until harvest time where God will sift the chaff from the wheat.
So this guy is being like, yeah, it's really fucked up that they're advertising they can cure your blood diseases, but it's up to God.
It should be up to God to make, let people know who's legit and not, which is such a weird stance.
How dare you?
How dare you?
Yeah.
That's God's department.
Yeah, that's God's job.
One preacher, Thomas Audu, stated, as a Christian, the Bible is the basis.
And we must take cognizance of the fact that not all that call the name of the Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven.
The devil himself has been shown to showcase some miracles too.
So we have to be careful not to be carried away, which is a really fun way of like threading that needle, you know, that it's both sides to it.
And I did find a very fun quote from a guy who doesn't support the ban that I actually unironically agree with, although maybe not in the way that Reverend Henry Awonyi meant it.
Quote, if they must ban miracles, they should also look into some advertisements like alcohol, films, cigarettes, and movies that are beyond the level of children.
And yeah, I'm totally fine with that.
Let's ban ads on to kids.
Let's do it.
That's the thing I love about people with bans.
They're like, well, if you ban this, you might as well ban the Bible.
Yeah.
All right.
I don't believe in banning any particular book, but I believe I'm fine with banning fake miracles on TV.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I'm saying like the way the logic always eventually comes back for the thing they're trying to protect, where it's like, well, then we might as well do this.
Like, yeah, maybe you do.
I mean, like, you can find a sense of destruction or, you know, negativity in whatever you look for.
Yeah.
And so what's interesting to me about this is this ban is clearly crafted to stop TB Joshua from recruiting people, but he kind of pivots.
And again, maybe the worst thing about this guy is how smart he is, right?
Because one of the things he is early on is realizing the value of social media.
And so he makes kind of a seamless pivot.
He launches a satellite station, Emmanu TV, that's like a YouTube channel.
And so he gets over the benefit on televising shit.
He's like, oh yeah, TV is not even where it is anymore.
I'm just going to start a fucking YouTube channel.
We'll get the videos out that way.
We'll get them out to even more fucking people.
He is considered maybe, there's definitely some experts quoting the BBC here.
Like he was the first of these pastors in Nigeria, at least, and one of the first in the world to really recognize how to use the internet to spread this kind of propaganda.
God damn it.
Like, is he ever going to fucking slip up?
I mean, yes, but it doesn't really matter.
Yeah, right, right.
Yeah.
But it's like every single thing, it's like he in, but like his instincts are just like spot on.
It's like, oh, yeah, okay, can't do that.
I'll pivot to digital video.
I'll pivot to this.
Yeah.
The two thoughts you have reading about him is like, what a monster.
And also, man, this guy was fucking smart.
Like he knows what he's doing.
He's got like seamless instincts.
Yeah.
So in following years, he would become one of the first pastors in Nigeria to create a Facebook account and again to start uploading his videos to YouTube.
And I think Emmanuel TV starts as like a satellite TV station, but like they start up a YouTube account very quickly.
He's putting videos on Facebook and they get to the point where both of these accounts have millions and millions of followers and subscribers.
And this really supercharges the growth of his flock to an astronomic level.
By 2014, Scone has branches in London, Greece, Ghana, South Africa, and a number of other countries and millions of followers around the world.
His prominence only increased in the years since the TV miracle ban.
In 2012, he was declared one of the 50 most influential people on the entire continent of Africa by the Africa report.
Scone became host to powerful people from across the region.
Ghana's president, Zimbabwe's prime minister, Nigeria's first lady, and the wife of Nelson Mandela all attended services.
Big names, you know?
Yeah, yeah, I've heard of them.
Yeah, heard of them.
So many Pentecostal pastors in Nigeria and elsewhere, or like many Pentecostal pastors, not just in Nigeria, but in the United States, he sold prayer cloths and holy water to followers.
He claimed that the water itself was treatment for a number of illnesses.
And as usual, he primed worshipers with videos of people cured of AIDS and other endemic illnesses with his holy water.
And then he started hawking it to crowds of people at churches in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere in West Africa.
Here's one worshiper testimonial on the power of this anointing water.
I myself have bought the anointing water and I have seen the miracles it performs.
My father was suffering from pain in his leg when I sprayed the water and after praying, the pain went away.
So that's good.
This guy continued, it's like in Jesus' time.
He did a lot of miracles.
So a lot of people followed him.
Now we see that God can manifest again.
When people come to the church, if they pray and they believe, they are healed.
And I might say, like, I don't think Jesus charged anybody.
Like, I don't tend to believe in supernatural hearing, but at least my recollection of the Bible from when I was a Christian is he was not charging people.
No, that was kind of the whole thing.
It was like, he was just, I mean, for lack of a better word, he's hooking people up, you know, just because he's got strength things attached to his phone that starts asking you for tips.
He's like, all right, what's going on?
What's this dude's name?
Lazarus?
Wait, hold on.
What y'all want?
Oh, hold on.
Hold on, man.
He's going to sell me that.
He's got a piece of paper taped over the stigmata hole in his hand that's got a Vimmo QR code.
Dude, the Stigmata is a QR code.
The Stigmata is a QR code.
Yeah, just scan this nail-size hole right there.
There you go.
Now, yeah, I can get your boy Laz up real quick.
You know what I mean?
But that's just going to be, that's like five.
That's like five racks.
All right.
So like any good businessman, TB Joshua knew that both hype and scarcity were critical for driving up demand.
But those two factors also have a tendency to make people crazy.
And in Ghana, this resulted in a massive stampede.
I'm going to quote from an article in The Guardian here.
The worshipers were hoping to obtain holy new anointing water, which Emmanuel TV had announced would be distributed for free.
The anointing water usually costs 80 cities, but we learned on Sunday that it would be given out for free, said Joseph Adenvor, 52, who witnessed the fatal stampede.
I have never seen anything like it before.
People had come from Togo, Benin, and even from Kenya.
They tried to close the church, but people were climbing over the walls and breaking in.
The police and army were there, but they couldn't control the crowds.
Holy shit.
The police who are investigating the deaths said that they had not anticipated the number of people who would attend the church and worshipers arriving as early as 2 a.m.
All of us were caught by surprise.
Police spokesman Freeman Teta told the BBC World Service.
No one knew the crowd will be so huge.
Four people died and more than 30 were injured.
So, you know, good again stuff.
Now, this one, he took a lesson out of like hype beast, like Black Friday doorbuster sale culture.
Right.
Yes.
And in fact, a few weeks before this, he made an unannounced appearance in the capital of Ghana, which shut the city down for a full day because he like he was selling stickers for cars that he promised if you put these stickers on your cars, they'll free you from poverty.
And it caused such a stampede that it like shuts the whole city down because he doesn't warn authorities, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
It's like, it's like if the president started showing up in cities with his motorcade and like no, no warning was given to like local police.
So you're just, it would, it would be even, I mean, it's already pretty bad if you've ever been in a city when the pressure.
But he's like, yeah, man, we can, we'll forgive your debt.
First 50 people here, forgiving your debt.
I'll give you like a passport, too.
How far away could we possibly be from that, Miles?
Oh, no.
I mean, God.
I don't want to think about it.
I don't want to think that too far in the future.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're good.
Let's just stick to 2014 when an Ebola outbreak ravaged sections of West Africa and government officials had to go to TB Joshua, not for help treating the disease, obviously.
but because they needed to tell him to tell his followers from other West African countries, don't go to Lagos for healing right now.
Right?
They're being like, look, man, we know the benefit, like the deals you have.
Do not like, we cannot encourage any religious tourism right now because it's just going to spread Ebola to the fucking capital, right?
Yeah.
And I will say, TB Joshua was a rational enough person to be like, well, yeah, that's probably not good for anybody.
That's probably going to be bad for me.
He's like, I'm going to be at the prime minister's house tomorrow, hooking people up.
Come through.
He does cancel a bunch of upcoming healing sessions, which is the minimum he could have done.
But he also sends 4,000 bottles of anointing water to Sierra Leone with a claim that it would cure anyone suffering from Ebola.
The water was flown in on a private jet that cost as much to make the trip as the cash donation TB Joshua's church made to buy food for victims of Ebola.
From an article in the Independent, quote, the preacher's TV channel, Emmanuel.tv, showed a video of a man called Joe Faya Niuma, who claims to represent Sierra Leone's High Commission, accepting the donation.
Niuma says on the video that the water will be used to curb the deadly Ebola yoke that is about to destroy our nation.
So that's good.
You love spreading disinformation about fucking Ebola.
Yeah, and yeah, and turning it into a little bit of marketing.
Yeah, a little bit of marketing.
Private Jets for Fake Cures00:03:08
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In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
Karma Doesn't Always Win00:16:00
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Like all true prophets, T.B. Joshua made numerous predictions about the future with perfect accuracy, at least according to him.
One of his chief claims to fame was correctly anticipating the maybe not so tragic and retrospect death of Michael Jackson.
Starting in January 2009, he told his followers to expect the death of a great star.
When the King of Pop died a mere six months later, he told everyone that's who I was referring to all along.
And this is a, he, he does this a lot.
This is, this is one of the more fun bits of TB Joshua lore.
Like Baba Vanga type shit, where it's like, oh, you're in, we got something coming this year, right?
Yeah.
In January 2013, he told followers, I am seeing flame in America.
Just a quarter of a year later, the Boston Marathon was bombed.
And although that didn't really involve a tremendous amount of flame, yeah, I think it was more of just like a brief explosion in shrapnel, but like, whatever.
He claims victory again.
Right.
I might also say like three months later, four months later, like, if you're saying I think America is going to be subject to a deadly attack, that happens like every week or so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To be fair.
Yeah.
And even flame, like at the rate of forest fires, like you're lucky to, you know, you get at least a couple a year, you can claim.
Yeah.
If you claim some sort of attack or a deadly thing is going to hit a bunch of Americans, you know, three months ahead of time, something will happen, right?
There'll be their own healthcare system.
There will be a crash, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
Critics claim that there's not even any evidence that he made the prediction in January, just a video published months later that Scone claimed had been recorded in January.
So who knows?
That same year, he predicted an attack in France, telling the people of the country that they should pray against suicide bombers or any attack of any kind that will affect many.
Two years later, ISIS militants carry out a series of attacks on the Boticlan nightclub in areas around in Paris, killing like 100-something people.
And he's like, this is what I was referring to two years previously.
Just like, yeah, man.
France is a big country.
If you're like, sometime in the next two years, a bad thing will happen in France.
It will.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, it's just probability at that point.
But hey, he's, you know, he's seeing things.
He is.
As a intermediary.
One of his few fuck-ups is in 2016, he calls the U.S. presidential election for Hillary Clinton.
Now, oh, man.
I know what you're saying, Miles.
I'm pretty sure Hillary Clinton did not, in fact, win the 2016 election.
Hillary won.
Hillary won.
The election was stolen.
Yeah, you are a big Hillary truther.
Scoon had a response to that when people were like, it seems like he was wrong about this.
And this comes from the Nigerian magazine Punch.
TB Joshua has said his prophecy on U.S. election was not off the mark.
He added that people need spiritual understanding to be able to interpret it.
During a service at the headquarters of his church at Ikotun, Lagos, and Sunday, Prophet TB Joshua said there was nothing controversial about the prophecy.
It is human beings that are controversial.
He stated that his words were misinterpreted because we're not on the same level of spiritual understanding.
An explanation which drew applause from his guy.
Literally, he's like, oh, you just don't get how right I was because I'm built different, baby.
Yeah, that's just that's on you.
I'm sorry.
I can't, I can't get you up to this level.
You know, or just kind of like the funny dude from Big Lebowski.
Yeah, that's just like your opinion, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
God, that's good.
That's just, that's just quality shit right there, Miles.
Yeah, that's shithausery to the to the maximum right there.
Now, by far, TB Joshua's favorite use of his gift of prophecy was to engage in his by now well-established tradition of fucking with Ghana for absolutely no reason.
That same year, 2016, he predicts a massive terrorist attack in Ghana, which provokes widespread panic among people in Ghana.
And like the police and security services have to keep issuing assurances, being like, we have no evidence that anything is wrong.
Please don't panic that you're about to die because of what the there.
I don't even, there's not even a, I think the only reason is that he's like, well, you know, probably there will be some sort of terrorist attack in Ghana at some point.
Like most countries have them occasionally.
So if I just call one now, eventually I'll be right and I can add this to my list of correct prophecies.
Who gives a shit if it causes a panic in the short term, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
He made a similar prophecy later in 2016, warning that South Africa's Orlando Stadium would be the site of a massive terrorist attack during an upcoming rap concert.
He predicted 12,000 deaths from this attack.
Oh my god.
That's you're calling.
I think he was getting, he's kind of, he's getting sloppy at this point.
That's what are they, how would they do that?
Yeah, come on, Beebruth.
Yeah, you're not calling them all.
What would the, what, what weapon would even cause a death toll like that?
That's four 9-11s.
Right.
How, and like, what's the capacity of that stadium?
He's basically saying like a third of it or whatever.
How many people say it's a big stadium?
It could certainly hold more people than that, but how would you kill everyone in the stadium?
Yeah.
And right, like why a rap?
Boko Haram, ISIS.
Neither of them have access to that kind of weaponry.
Wait, but what's the was like he said a rap concert?
Like, was that meant to be like a specific artist?
No, no, I think there was a rap concert, right?
Right, right.
I don't know why.
I'm not enough of an expert on like the dynamics of the rap industry in Nigeria and how it interrelates to the evangelical movement to know if there was more going on there.
Well, this is South Africa.
Maybe he wasn't a fan of Deantward.
Yeah, who could blame him for that?
We all saw that movie.
Yeah, right.
No, no, no.
Good God.
What was it?
Chappie?
My God.
That's the real crime making Chappie.
Why?
Why did they allow them in here?
Also, he's like, the guy's a monster, and the girl's a Nepo baby, apparently.
They're not rappers.
This ain't hip-hop.
I haven't kept up with DeAntword since that movie.
Why would you?
I think you may be able to do an episode on them.
Oh, good.
Okay, cool.
That'll be fun.
Yeah.
So, yeah, obviously, 12,000 people are not killed in the stadium.
And when nothing happens, he announces that the post on his Facebook page predicting this had been fake news.
See, he loved it again.
He keeps learning.
He's paying attention to Trump at this point.
He's like, well, shit, I can make money on this.
Right.
My God.
So by 2014, TB Joshua was 49 years old and worth, I think the estimates of his wealth are all fucked because they usually say 10 to 15 million dollars.
But like he has a private jet that's worth like $60 million.
He's in the Panama Papers, he and his wife for having incorporated a company in the British Virgin Islands.
And like, you don't, the Panama Papers, I don't think, I don't think you're noteworthy among that crowd at 10 to 15 million dollars.
No, no, that's like what their gardeners make.
Yeah, exactly.
Mysteriously.
Yeah.
Your daughter's your gardener?
Yeah.
I'm going to guess he has a lot more cash than this, but he's just smart about like he is about most things about like protecting the presentation of it all is.
Yeah.
He has a lot more to hide than just money.
This kind of prison harem complex he built for this purpose, or at least one of them, because there are, you know, several, you saw the video of that, several large buildings in the compound.
And one of them that he plans himself is initially four stories tall.
And this is the height of the building that the foundations had been poured to support.
As time went on, Stone keeps growing and he's like, I want to make this building taller.
So add another couple of stories to the top there.
I'll design them, right?
All the construction on the property is carried out by cult members because that saves time and money.
And he's the one designing the building himself and basically bribing the government and architects to ignore that like nothing is being done up to spec.
And this becomes a problem.
Miles, I don't know if you're aware of this, but if you add more stories to a building that it's meant to support, that could cause some serious issues.
I don't know.
No, that's just, I think you're kind of like on a different level of spiritual understanding that I'm on when it comes to geometry or physics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're, you're a, you're a, a big, um, I don't know enough about physics to make a good joke about this.
So maybe it's fine, but it's not going to be fine.
It's going to kill a lot of people.
You know who else they said couldn't keep adding stories?
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
And then we got the book of Revelations.
Praise be.
Now scan my stigmata for you.
Yeah.
You are going for salvation.
So as Ray related, quote, he just kind of kept pushing and saying, I want it higher.
It must go higher.
It must go higher.
So that's that's great.
This is not going to end well, Miles.
Wait, so what was it built for?
And what did the building end for?
Four stories, and it winds up being six.
So they've got like 50% more weight on that foundation than it should have.
And one has to assume other corners are being cut too.
People were aware from a fairly early period that the building is not safe.
It would sway like you could see and feel it swaying in heavy wind.
Followers reported that the staircases and the building around the staircases would wobble when you went up, which is a bad sign.
I don't think I've ever been on a wobbly staircase.
No.
No.
Fuck that shit.
I mean, maybe if I was like tripping or something, maybe I've been on a few wobbly, like never in my right frame of mind and firmly in reality, no.
Yeah, it's you would not want to be in a building like this.
On September 12th, 2014, one of TB Joshua's disciples warned him that the structure of the building was showing imminent signs of failure.
He ignored the warning and ordered 200 foreign visitors, mostly South Africans, into the ground floor dining room so that they could eat lunch.
Two hours later, the building collapsed.
And the video of this, like, it looks like, you know, if you've seen like 9-11 footage, it's like that kind of collapse.
It just is, it's there and it goes down.
And it's like pancakes on it.
It's just like, yeah, it pancakes.
If you remember back in Florida, there was that condo building that collapsed a few years back.
It looked a lot like that, where it's just down.
Dozens, perhaps more than 100, were killed instantly.
More than 800 people are also trapped inside.
These numbers are really vague.
We have no idea how many people were in the building when it collapsed or how many died, really, because first responders are blocked from entering the compound itself for 24 hours, right?
What?
He attempts to have his own people carry out the rescue efforts and blocks the government from entering.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
From one report, quote, some church workers attempted to save lives in reckless and amateur ways without the use of mechanical equipment or medical training.
They use tools from the church's maintenance department.
In one instance, a church worker allegedly used a chainsaw to amputate the leg of a man who was trapped under a fallen beam.
He was screaming, says Emmanuel, visually shaken during his interview.
He is not sure if the man survived.
I saw a lot of things that really traumatized me.
Faces were crushed, says Michael, a disciple who was in his late teens at the time.
Followers have since told reporters that they were told during this like 24-hour period where he's kept the authorities out that some of his followers are ordered to drive van loads full of corpses out of the compound to be buried in secret.
What we can verify is a death toll of at least 116.
What can be verified?
Yes.
Yeah, almost certainly more than that.
How much more is unclear, but like, that's a lot.
You know, that's all on its own a really bad disaster, you know?
Right.
And especially when you have to add the caveat where it's like, look, these are the ones we can confirm because we've also heard that they were absconding with corpses in the night.
Yeah, they were driving vans of dead people away to God knows where.
A coroner's inquest found that the church was culpable for criminal negligence and recommended that T.B. Joshua be personally charged.
But once again, he bribed local officials and reporters and nothing was done.
To placate his own followers, T.B. Joshua turned towards the well-worn authoritarian tactic of spreading conspiracy theories.
And I mentioned in episode one, he was generally better on like not being racist against Muslims than most Pentecostal preachers in Nigeria are kind of known to be.
This is where he turns on that because he decides the best way to like try to put this away is to claim that Boko Haram had carried out a terrorist attack to destroy the building.
It wasn't that he ordered them to make it in a way that was unsafe.
And he even, he has his people edit together a loose change style documentary that claimed to show either Nigerian government or terrorist Boko Haram jets flying over the complex before the structure failed.
No.
Yeah.
They're doing like.
He doesn't Alex Jones.
And they're putting like it was doctored footage or that's what they're just saying.
Like they have accounts.
I have seen clips from this documentary, and it doesn't even sound or look like there's like there's a plane in the air, but like it's the capital of Nigeria.
There's always planes in the air.
There's certainly it doesn't show a jet fighter bombing this building, right?
And I'm sorry, that's a Boko Haram fighter jet?
Yeah, and then I really think Boko Haram have fighter jets.
I'm sure they've got some like planes, like prop planes and shit.
You know, they're not a tiny organization.
But I don't think they're capable of carrying out an aerial bombing on the capital of Lagos.
I think that's beyond Boko Haram's capacity.
Yeah.
And I think, yeah, the Nigerian government may have something to say too, if that actually happened.
Yeah, I think the Nigerian government probably says something.
Like, Boko Haram did care.
I believe they carried out an attack on like a mall in Nigeria around this period.
And it was not like hushed up.
It was a pretty big deal.
Yeah.
Jesus.
So it works well enough.
TB Joshua continues to preach, and Scone continues to rake in money for another seven years.
He would likely still be making money to this day.
But on June 5th, 2021, right after carrying out a life broadcast, TB Joshua dropped dead.
He was 57 years old.
His wife claims that he had shown no signs of illness previously, but like, that doesn't mean anything.
These people are all liars.
You know, maybe he had cancer.
Maybe he had like a heart condition.
Who knows?
It's not clear to me that we will ever know precisely, but thankfully he's fucking dead.
Yeah.
The one thing we know is that it wasn't karma because if that were the case, a lot of these fucking motherfuckers wouldn't be alive right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely not karma because he never really pays the price.
I guess you could say he died earlier than is normal for a man of his level of wealth, but not early enough that I'm like, good, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's good that he's dead, but it took God took his sweet time on this one.
Seriously.
He has a massive funeral, obviously, well attended by local celebrities and politicians.
An enormous crowd marches his coffin through the streets.
His wife, Evelyn, has taken over Scone in his wake.
I think it's probably suffered without him as he never left a clear successor.
And I think the general consensus from people who know more about Pentecostalism in Nigeria than I do is that he's probably the church is probably slowly on its way to fading into irrelevance, but you know, it's still around.
And yeah, TB Joshua never really brought to justice for his crimes.
Justice Takes Its Sweet Time00:04:06
So that's cool.
Maybe something will happen to Evelyn now that some of this stuff has come out, but I don't have a ton of faith in it in that.
No, no.
Seldom.
The bad guys seem to win a lot.
I've noticed in a weird way, but who knows?
Maybe, maybe that'll change.
Maybe that'll change.
Maybe that, yeah, maybe we'll finally get a handle on the human race this year.
Maybe this will be the one.
Yeah, yeah, we're starting off strong.
We're starting off strong.
Yes, it's been a good year so far.
Seems like everyone's doing really well.
Speaking of doing well, Miles, why don't you do well by directing our listeners towards your pluggables?
Yeah.
Thank you so much again for listening to me right now.
And I will count on your continued support with my missionary, my mission church evangelicalism podcast called the Daily Zeitgeist.
It's about news, politics, comedy, and just a little bit of good old Christ talk too.
So check into that every day.
And also check out silvermiles.net, where you can pick up some of my blessed vials of colloidal silver.
And you can, it cures honestly everything.
Like, I don't even have to tell you because it literally cures.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You'll get better at like fucking video games.
It's not really for health.
I should say that.
It's not for health.
It's like more like stuff to be cooler.
Oh, okay.
Wow.
That's very irresponsible, Miles.
Yeah.
It'll make you a better freestyle rapper.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Graffiti.
It does it all.
It does it all.
Yeah.
And I'm going to go ahead and say it'll cure your syphilis.
So don't go to the doctor if you get syphilis.
That's just going to go.
Silvermiles.net.
Go silvermiles.net.
Anyway, Sophie, we're not still sponsored by big syphilis, are we?
Not that I'm aware of.
All right.
Big syphilis.
Yeah.
All right.
Then avoid catching syphilis until they pay us.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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