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Before we start, some episodes in this series of World of Secrets contain graphic descriptions of sexual and physical violence, including sexual assault, rape and the language associated with it. We're watching a grainy video from 1989. A young man with a beard is standing in a wooden house.
with bamboo pillars and raffia palm leaves for its roof. He's smiling and laughing, joking with a small crowd of people, staring at him intently. This is the man in the white robes, the man that would convince Ray and Anika, young women from England, to give up their lives and devote themselves to him. Amen!
and he has just founded the Synagogue Church of All Nations in Lagos, Nigeria. He wanted to be the biggest, the best, the most important, most adored, acknowledged pastor in the world. That's Ray, the person I met in a pub in England with her friend Annika. In that pub, Ray told me disturbing things about the man laughing and joking in the video. The man in the white robes.
Stories from Lagos, so strange that they were hard to believe. You tried the police, you tried the media multiple times, you'd gone to Interpol. It was not like we were the first choice. Honestly, the number of times I tried to reach out and I just wasn't listened to. And the crux of why I wasn't listened to is the worst of it all, because it was in Africa and nobody gave a damn. We couldn't uncover the truth about the Prophet in England...
We needed to go to Nigeria, to where it all began for the man in the white robes, Prophet TB Joshua. This is World of Secrets, Season 2, The Disciples. A BBC World Service investigation with me, Charlie Northcote. And me, Yemi Siadegoke. Episode 2, The Prophet. I'm at a Sunday church service here in Lagos. There's about 2,000 people here.
It's not the synagogue church of all nations. TB Joshua's church is bigger and can attract tens of thousands of worshippers. But right now, going there doesn't seem like a good idea. I came here because I wanted to give you a sense of how religious Nigeria is. Roughly 90% of Nigerians identify as religious, and Christianity and Islam are the two biggest faiths. The country is roughly split 50-50 between the two.
Many Christians, like the ones here, identify as Pentecostal. I've been living in Lagos for the past ten years, working for the BBC, alongside Charlie, who's come out for this series. Can you tell me a bit about your faith background? Born and baptised Anglican. Went to church every Sunday morning.
until I went to university. And then when I moved to Nigeria, I did try a couple of churches, mostly the Pentecostal ones, because there's a lot of music. It's, like, lively. It's really fun. I'd heard of Prophet TB Joshua before. Most people in Nigeria have. And one of the reasons for that is he's very different to the other pastors in Nigeria.
Some would say a surefire way to make money in Nigeria is to open up a church. A lot of the big Pentecostal pastors are very wealthy men. A lot of that money comes from tithes, it comes from offering, and they're not afraid of sort of showing that wealth. What was different about TB Joshua compared to other pastors? I mean, the fact that he dressed...
And it was the promise of receiving that blessing, how different he seemed from other pastors, that drew people to him. Like the two young women from England who you heard in the last episode.
Annika and Ray. So I remember Annika arriving because at that time I was the fourth foreign recruit. I just remember because Annika had come from the UK. By the time Annika had arrived at the church, Ray had already been chosen as a disciple. Annika, though, was just a visitor. I was expecting to stay for six weeks for the UK summer holidays and then I was going to return to start my degree.
During six weeks, I began to understand what a difference was between visitor and disciple. A disciple is you have given your life to this ministry in the same way that you give your life to Jesus. It's all or nothing. And to become a disciple, you needed to learn about T.B. Joshua's extraordinary life. It's a life that's been captured in many books and videos, like this one. In 1963...
A humble home in a rural district of Origadi, Ondo State, Nigeria, became the scene of an incredible miracle. I heard that TB Joshua's conception and his time in the womb was incredible.
supernatural that he was in the womb for longer than the nine months. A child had finally been born after 15 months in his mother's womb. Before he was born, there was some prophecy given that there was going to be this mighty person that was born in this village of Arigidi. Anything close to Jesus.
I believed everything I heard immediately about him. If he said it, anyone else said it, nothing was implausible.
And what they read and watched in those books and films about T.B. Joshua...
only seemed to be confirmed when they were invited to visit the place he was born. He wanted to show us where he was from. Yeah, it's like a shack. Confirmed his biblical roots. That he was born in poverty and humility. Almost Jesus-like. Like Jesus. And then was raised to greatness. When I thought of Phoebe Joshua, I thought of biblical characters. I thought of Moses. St Peter, Elijah, Elisha. Old Testament. All of the major prophets. Prophets.
And it wasn't just the stories of his origins that got people talking. It was the impact when he walked into a room. He was very strange. Nigerian journalist Solomon Ashoms was watching TB Joshua's rise closely. He was a lot more on the outer dots.
You see people jumping and lying down and vomiting. Delivering people from evil spirits is in the Bible and is a common practice in many churches around the world. But T.B. Joshua's deliverances were dramatic and extreme. He was the first person talking to sort of like demons.
Fire!
You pray for somebody, speak to the spirit that is terrorizing them. Why are you here? Who are you? We've never seen anything like that before. We've never, in the history of Christianity or in the history of Pentecostal church, we have never seen anything like that.
And neither had Ray nor Annika. Demons appearing in the crowd, I was always, like, excited. I thought, wow, this is biblical stuff. I was truly terrified when someone came forward. And then how proud I felt when TB Joshua would come out, you know, his chest, standing tall, saying, get out, out! And then he'd have this kind of to and fro, almost like a drama, like a skit with this person. They'd roll on the floor and scream and foam and shake and...
and the crowd would cheer and then it would be gone. And then they'd be praising and singing from the crowd. And then they'd confess their sin. It would be over. People everywhere. People begging, small children, eating on the side of the road.
It's like an elderly woman selling dried fish and she's like falling asleep. Probably caught near Lagos or in the lagoon or something. She looks exhausted. I wonder when she got up this morning. Lagos is a city of extremes. Pockets of wealth are dotted around. But the area of TB Joshua's church, Ikotun, isn't one of them. On the side there are different shops selling...
Everything you can think of, from backpacks and casual clothes to mattresses and flip-flops and gas canisters. It's just fuelled by hustle. There's a saying, no food for lazy man. Anything you've got, you've got to work for it here. There's no social security system, there are no handouts, no one's helping you. You've got to make your own way in the world. And that's exactly what TB Joshua did. He hustled.
Like millions of Nigerians, he was born in a rural village and moved to Lagos to make his name. In his church, he was keen to show how normal and humble he was. Prophet TB Joshua regularly took time out of his busy schedule to join the workers preparing food. Here he is, on his knees, scrubbing away on the floor of the toilet inside his early church. Cleaning the toilets of the church every day for three years.
cleaned the fans and benches daily. There were hundreds of them. He cleaned them all. And he made sure his grafting was captured on video. Another journalist watching TB Joshua's rise from inside Nigeria was Adijuan Shoyinka. He was a huge celebrity and he had a way of presenting himself as humble, easygoing and friendly man of God.
Who would rather use his money for philanthropy? It wouldn't be uncommon to see people queuing outside the church and TB Joshua would be there. Giving them cash, giving them foodstuff, bags of rice, visiting old people's homes. That kind of set him apart from the other pastors. There are so many stories about TB Joshua's philanthropy. Just like Jesus, he was generous and he was humble.
I want to tell you that I'm your brother. There were times he would walk into an orphanage and pay for all the children's school fees. What you want me to be, I'm ready. In this video, he emulated Jesus' feeding of the 5,000, but with a modern twist. Rather than bread and fish, he gave thousands of homeless people KFC. Those who are lonely should trust in the goodness of God.
In 1999, Nigeria had transitioned back to democracy from military dictatorship. Public infrastructure had been seriously neglected. It was difficult and expensive to get healthcare treatment. TB Joshua stepped into this vacuum with big promises. For sick people who couldn't afford to go to hospital, TB Joshua offered hope. It was immediate and free.
The average person who goes to church in this part of the world has gone there because they've got one problem or the other that they wanted a solution to. And he built an image around himself as that kind of solution provider. The economy was also on a nosedive. So you had a church that presented immediate and instant solutions to whatever it is that you brought to church on a Sunday. So that in itself was a major, a huge attraction.
The Prophet meticulously recorded all of this generosity on VHS videos and handed those videos out for free. They show him walking among his congregation, laughing and joking with his followers, sometimes barefoot in the dirt.
Ray remembers a visit to his home village. He would throw dollars out of the window of the vehicle to all the people in the village and they'd be running, man of God, man of God, you're in a really rural village. He was throwing like dollars out the window of the car and there were like hundreds of people chasing the vehicle and it was like this hero had come home. Ah, perfect. He did you short. Philanthropists.
In Lagos today, when I ask people about him, TB Joshua seems popular. He's a man of God. You believe he's a man of God? A man of God. I do watch his programme and I saw what God is doing in the ministry. The way he carries people along and the way he helps people also is good. And I saw how philanthropic he was, helping a lot of people.
Many people in Lagos love T.P. Joshua. On one street we found a man selling a portrait of him, a two-metre high picture, the pastor with a blue background in a white suit.
So there's a little stall on the side of the road that's got a few paintings. There's Nelson Mandela and one is of TB Joshua. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, sir. You have TB Joshua. He's just a pastor that I really appreciate a lot. So I just love drawing him. In fact, any time I'm drawing synagogue, it brings joy to me. He tells us members of the church often ask him to paint pictures of TB Joshua. How many times would you say you've done that?
And next to the painting of T.P. Joshua is one of former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela.
And like Nelson Mandela, his appeal transcended race. Shortly after the end of apartheid, white minority rule in South Africa, TV Joshua started to attract white South Africans, predominantly Afrikaners, to Lagos. Like with Annika and Ray, the miracle videos had reached them too. Boom!
His first biggest international audience was from South Africa. And it wasn't just South Africans, it was the white people in South Africa. And as this white South African visitor would admit, they found themselves in an unlikely place. Believe you me, brothers and sisters, Nigeria was the last place on earth that I ever wanted to come to. They fraudsters, they money launderers, they drug peddlers. And I say, God, sorry.
Here is a piece of heaven on earth. They now spoke about this prophet, this man of God in Nigeria. I'm so blessed because I've never seen this, a black man giving a white man money. You know, money. I'm not talking about a place to stay. The late 90s, early 2000s, they were the most predominant crowd that was there. And they come in, they tell other people about it. From that moment on, I was healed. I was totally healed.
And I went back. People who are sick were going there. People who need deliverance were going there. Pastors, prophets who run big churches were also going there. All the news all over the world and there is nowhere in the world that God is moving and healing HIV patients like he's doing here. I can testify of that. It is the truth. Celebrities. There was actually a rugby player. I think he had stage four cancer. And that
Easily spread the word. He's offering them easy absolution. You just pray and all your past sins have been forgiven. I can imagine it would be an attractive proposition for people who can't really sort of interrogate some of the things that they supported and helped uphold. The South Africans who visited also found themselves being filmed and put into those videos. In a rare interview with TB Joshua...
A journalist asked him about all of these videos. None of this happened by accident. Those videos, the humble man, the generous man.
Everything was meticulously recorded and saved. Should I follow my heart or swim?
In 2012, a new charity bursts onto the scene. It's called Believe in Magic and it grants wishes to seriously ill children.
It has the support of the biggest boy band in the world, One Direction. It's run by an inspirational 16-year-old girl called Megan Bari, who herself is battling a brain tumour. I've been in and out of hospital and seen so many other very poorly children. But when questions arise about her story, they reveal she could be facing another, very different danger. What is this girl going through? It wasn't supposed to end like this. Listen to Believe in Magic wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Hey, everyone. This is Molly and Matt, and we're the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts. It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting. Let's get started.
Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more. Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff. This is Winchester. Winchester, South England.
I mean, just by looking at it, it's not the type of place that I would think a radical Pentecostal church would take root. As we walk past an opera-singing busker down a Georgian high street, it really hits me. We're a long way from Lagos. But it's here that TB Joshua's church would take one of its strongest holds. Why? I don't know. It's just, you know, very leafy, quite quiet. It looks kind of suburban-y. We've come to meet someone called Matt McNaught,
He's a therapist and he grew up here in the 1990s. And back then, he was a member of an evangelical church called Emmanuel. It's one of many churches that would end up becoming a recruitment ground for TB Joshua's disciples. Matt's in his early 40s. He's relaxed and friendly, but clearly a deep thinker. He considers every word he's about to say quite carefully. We're standing outside Emmanuel Church...
But it's shut down. Matt hasn't been back here for about 20 years. When Matt was a teenager, the church was at its height. It was a vibrant local community full of young people. Today it's a dance studio and quite a grand one. They tell us they're happy for us to have a look around and we go in. Kind of almost like a wedding cake type experience.
Decorations, you know, just this... You can tell from Matt's face that he's quite moved being back here. To be part of this church was... It wasn't to have a family. I'd never really had a sense of community or belonging, anything like this since, really. In the 90s, this place was full of excitement and energy. Really charged atmosphere in the room. Like, you would see people kind of spasming, believing that they'd come under the power of the Holy Spirit...
There was this sense of being on the edge of something extraordinary. Matt's brought with him one of the old sermons that was read in those days of the church. It's the kind of thing that would fill people with overwhelming emotion. People weeping. He gets it out and starts reading.
The Vision is an army of young people and they are free from materialism. They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday. They are free, yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying. This is an army that will lay down its life for the cause. A million times a day its soldiers choose to lose. That they might one day win the great well done of faithful sons and daughters.
Outside the former church, we sit with Matt in a beautiful herb garden. There's an ice cream van across from us, kids are laughing and playing. It's all very Middle England. We were living in the 90s, we were kind of predominantly white and comfortable as a congregation. Life wasn't especially challenging or exciting and there was a sense of the dullness of just, you know, suburban life. Like Annika and Ray...
Members from Matt's church were hungry for something more. We reject the kind of dead ritual and tedious just turning up that you get in the Church of England and just, you know, that kind of intellectual lukewarmness. And we believe wholeheartedly that if we have faith, amazing things will happen. For a while, there had been talk of revival.
Come here. What's happening to you? I just feel the joy of the Lord all over me. In Toronto, there was this movement called the Toronto Blessing. The revival hit his whole church. The revival hit his whole church. The Holy Spirit suddenly took over the service. Everybody in this big Christian fellowship started laughing hysterically. Pick him up. Are you drunk? Yep. LAUGHTER What would your church do if they see you now? Laugh with me. LAUGHTER
falling on the floor. You would have these long all-night services where people would just be completely floored by the spirit. This happened again powerfully day after day for years, drawing people from around the world. This kind of prompted a lot of talk in our church and in many churches around the UK that we were just on the cusp of this incredible revival.
Imagine a rainstorm where it's just brewing and you can feel the heaviness in the air and then you get one or two big fat drops landing on you. And it genuinely was an incredibly exciting time. I was in my early teens, really aware that it was quite lame to be a Christian in the UK in the 1990s. And then this was the sense that, OK, no, we are in touch with something really big and really powerful that other people don't know about.
So there was this trend, I guess, of tourism, really, to go to these places, to experience it for yourself, either to get healing or just to get your faith renewed, but also this sense that you might bring it back and it might happen here in Winchester. And there were prophecies of just Winchester being just taken over by the Holy Spirit, people in the high street just falling down in repentance.
The revival didn't take off in Winchester. But stories about another place were starting to reach his church. Stories of a man who was channelling God in a way nobody had ever seen before. Stories of extraordinary miracles and deliverances taking place at the Synagogue Church of All Nations, also known as SCOANN.
You know, there were videos at the back of the church hall from Scoan. There's just so much overload. And just like Annika and Ray from the last episode...
People from Matt's church were also transfixed by these videos. I mean, my brother was telling me about like a party he went to in someone's house, which had lots of different rooms with stuff going on. And my disciple friend who had put on a video in one of the rooms, a TB Joshua miracles compilation. What in the middle of this?
In this party, in this like youth Christian party, but there would have been like cans of Fosters and just like music in one room and people just doing usual party stuff. And then in one room they were watching TV Joshua Healing. It was almost like people were watching pornography, but it was also like sanctified. Young people across the UK, thirsty for religious revival, began to travel to Nigeria.
seeking out the man performing miracles. I guess I'm just curious, like, there were other charismatic pastors at that time around the world, in the States, even in Nigeria. What was it about Tibi Joshua, do you think, that made people...
leave this beautiful, lovely, leafy place to go to Lagos. I mean, it's almost exactly that contrast. There's something really extreme about TB Joshua.
And what T.B. Joshua had was just this kind of, I guess you could say, a wildness. There's plenty of Nigerian pastors who are just incredibly articulate. You know, they're very eloquent, they're very well-read. And T.B. Joshua was none of those things. He was kind of raw. And maybe this is the real deal. That excitement was felt by Annika too. Once she'd arrived at the church, it was like she was part of what she'd been reading about. I can't put into words...
how much I felt like I was living scripture. What I'd been reading and studying for so many years, I was seeing it with my own eyes. Ray was a little more sceptical at first. When I arrived, I went and I'd made a pact with God. There's a bunch of books in the Bible called the Gospels and they're all about the miracles that Jesus performed. And I basically kind of made a pact with God that...
I want to know the God of the Gospels. I want to see those miracles and if I can't see them and they're not real, I'm out of here. The very first time I ever saw a miracle in front of me had an extremely profound effect on me. There was a lady sitting down. From my recollection, she had cancer. As soon as he stretched his hand towards this person, she just started vomiting on the floor.
That very instantaneous reaction right in front of my face, it was like I just broke down in tears. It was a real heart-wrenching realisation in that second that, oh my God, Jesus is actually alive. He is actually real. This is an utterly life-changing moment. And Joshua saw that and he came over to me with a handkerchief and he wiped my eyes. We'll be coming back to that.
At the end of the six weeks, Annika was at a crossroads. She had a choice to make, a choice that would define her life. When it got to the end of the six weeks, it was time for me to go home. I was called into TB Joshua's private bedroom in the middle of the night. This was the first time I'd had a one-to-one time with him. When we went into the room, it was very dark.
It had blue-coloured lighting. It was very calm, almost spa-esque. I felt very privileged. I thought, wow, I'm going to the Holy of Holies. I was instructed to kneel, which I did, and I was very quiet and very timid. I was told to be very subservient and bow and nod and very nervous, as if I was going to meet God himself. And he said to me, do you want to stay?
And I was quite taken back by that question. I think I kind of spluttered, you know, didn't really give a clear answer. And he said, God has told me you are meant to stay here. And I was like, wow, like I'd won the lottery. God himself has said I'm meant to stay. And I think I took a deep breath and was like, OK, do you want to stay? I said, yes, sir. Yes, sir. I said, good, you will stay. The next point was just to tell my friends and my family that, hey, guys, I'm not coming back.
My dad, being the lovely person he is, was supportive of me like he always was. He was very proud that I was pursuing God in anything I did because obviously he was a Christian. I had a plan, you know. I'd received my A-level results while I was there. You know, ordinarily he'd be skipping and jumping about the results day and I'm like, have I got into that university? But that didn't matter one hoot in that moment. I thought, it doesn't matter. It was like going to heaven and being asked to stay.
Why would I want to leave? At the dawn of the millennium, TB Josh was no longer a mysterious healer in a shack. People had begun to call him the Prophet.
And over the next decade, his power and influence would grow even further. Lined up on the streets of one of the international airports in Mexico are masses of people. In 2015, Latin America's biggest stadium was packed. These fans are not here for a football match.
They're here for Prophet TB Joshua. By the time of this event, the prophet had built a religious empire that had stretched from his compound in Nigeria across the globe. Even at the stadium, you can see his disciples. Disciples like Annika and Ray, holding the microphones, catching people as they fall, making sure everything was recorded.
They would prove crucial in spreading his message to the world. But we were about to hear how TB Joshua's plans were darker than Ray and Anika could have ever expected. The real TB Joshua is not who you think he is. The real TB Joshua is not the humble man that you see, the philanthropist that you see, the so-called prophet that you see. TB Joshua had an interest in their minds.
and how he could change the way they think. He took away people's families, he took away people's education, he took away people's choice, people's humanity, their integrity. He dehumanised us all. He took people who were good, caring, kind, lovely people who had come from great homes and he turned them into monsters. Next time on The Disciples. When you trust someone that much to the point where...
If he'd have said to do anything, I would have done it. Thanks for listening to World of Secrets, Season 2, The Disciples, from the BBC World Service. This is Episode 2 of 9.
Thank you to everyone around the world who spoke to us and shared their stories for this investigation. We want as many people as possible to hear their stories, so please do tell others about World of Secrets. And where you can do, rate and leave a review. We'd be really grateful and it really does help. This season of World of Secrets is produced by BBC Audio Documentaries and is presented by me, Yemi Siadigoke, and Charlie Northcott.
It's been made in collaboration with BBC Africa Eye, with original investigation by Charlie Northcott and Helen Spooner. The producer is Rob Byrne. Additional production from Tom Sarté. The executive producer is Georgia Catt. The series editor is Philip Sellers. At the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Lee Chung. And the podcast commissioning editor is John Manel. Thank you again for listening.
The vision is an army of young people. You see bones, I see an army. And they are free from materialism. They laugh at 9-5 prisons. They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday. They wouldn't even notice. They are mobile like the wind. They belong to the nations. They need no passport. People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence.
They are free, yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying. What is the vision? The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes. It makes children laugh and adults angry. It gave up the game of minimum integrity long ago to reach for the stars. It scorns the good and strains for the best. It is dangerously pure.
This is an army that will lay down its life for the cause, a million times a day its soldiers choose to lose, that they might one day win the great well done of faithful sons and daughters. Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as on Sunday night. They don't need fame from names, instead they grin quietly upwards and hear the crowds chanting again and again, come on.
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Hi, I'm Graeme Klaas, host of Technically Speaking, an Intel podcast. Join me for season two as we explore the future of technology evolving today. In each episode, I'll speak with the minds transforming medicine, healthcare, retail, entertainment, personal computing, and more with the help of AI. Join me every other Tuesday and explore the latest technology changing our world today and creating a more accessible tomorrow.
Listen to Technically Speaking, an Intel podcast on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
