The floodgates have opened. All the disgusting, depraved details are surfacing. Now the public is learning what the majority of us already knew – that TB Joshua was a deranged, fake, and closet sexual pervert until death. A victim narrated her ordeal below. The year was 2008.
On Tuesday October 14, 2008, the World in Focus programme of the Revelation Christian channel beamed a tantalising view of satanic harem to millions of its viewers. Bespectacled Pastor Yemi Balogun, the ebullient and intelligent anchor of this programme brought in a beautiful, clever but victimised white woman to pirouette, like a singing canary, on a topic aptly dubbed, “Delivered from a cult.” The case of Anneka Kinch made a sober viewing.
Anneka Kinch did not disappoint. She pried open previously closed inner world of a libidinous famous prophet who morph nightly into a sexual monster. She regurgitated a sustained immoral revelation of sexual abuse that induced an insanely, eye-bulgingly, and mouth-foaming fury which naturally cascaded into an alarming moral panic. Grumbling grenades were dropped on the fortified Synagogue of this notorious and well-known Ikotun-Egbe based prophet. TBJ is a muddy creek, an exemplar of the ignoble black devil, grand master of the antiquated Sodomic Order, empty vessel, deceiver, and prince of darkness. Since the beginning of time, man, yes mortal man, has combed the wilds, mountains, forests, and rivers in search of a Deity to worship and praise. In each of us, there is a distant echo of the sacred. There is also an inner conviction that the world could not have been perfectly ordered without God as the architect and divine driver-designer.
After thousands of years of reverence for the light of salvation, the forces of capitalism would later bring a seismic shift. When capitalism brought wealth to man, his innate adoration for God took a spectacular tumble under the weight and greedy embrace of the good life. Expectedly, spiritual death set in. Not for long. Along came a massive gale of change. Since spiritual vacuum could not be sustained for long in the heart of man, a new quest began to emerge. Then in the 50’s, Pentecostalism was born. The whole world was encircled with a replay of the day of the Pentecost. Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, spiritual warfare, deliverance, salvation, grace, embrace of prosperity, worship, vigil, crusade, evangelism, healing, prophecy, resurrection, and demonic exorcism become the dominant paradigms of the new church.
Man’s search for the spiritual after a thaw has now received a deserved renewal through Americanised televangelism. Africans were to give the new charismatic movement a solid rear-guard. Even then, the emergence of post-modern prosperity, unrestrained freedom and the birth of individualism ushered in an era of heretical views, and once again, the existence of a divine God began to be re-examined and questioned. Falling on their freely given spirit of choice, thousands of people saw God in ‘Mother Meera’ an Indian woman who lived in Germany.
Thousands more would find a divine reincarnation of God on earth in Guru Maharajah along Ibadan-Lagos expressway. Even in late Prophets Godspower Oyewole and Maryland-based Jesus of Oyingbo.
Millions who were unable to comprehend the existence of God Almighty resorted to worshipping Satan, ogun, ifa, yemanja, egun, crystals, animals, Feng Shui, sacred stones, forests, Hinduism, and Hare Rama Hare Krishna. Those seeking the meaning of life began to embrace readily available man-made alternatives which led to more confusion, depression, emptiness, and anxiety.
There is no language, no symbols strong enough to illuminate the realities of the existence of God. Anneka Kinch was caught between these extreme dilemmas. She grew up in a Christian household under devout and God-fearing parents. Like the pilgrims’ fathers, she was infected with a quest to search for the real and living God. She found God in her home turf of United Kingdom. Unsatisfied, she upped her spiritual ante by looking further afield for signs and wonders. Then something happened.
The atmosphere of her old church was warm, and spirit filled. At 18, she enjoyed every bit of her Sunday worship with family and friends. Later, she got bored of listening to the same old, recycled Sunday homiletics, moral certainties, and Bible stories. Innocently, a male member of her local church brought a DVD of an African prophet performing miracles. The miraculous rendering of the prophet’s awesome supernatural power overawed Anneka Kinch. Instantly, gullibility and adventure became fused, and she headed out to the sun.
Against the received wisdom of her pastor, she headed for Nigeria in search of signs, wonders and the miraculous. Her internal demons seem less easily placated or persuaded to behave. She wanted to see a reincarnated Jesus on African soil! She desired God but a serpent was waiting. This time without the apple nearby!
In Mao’s China, during the Cultural Revolution, re-education was a must. There, all the codes, philosophy and attitudes of the new China were born. In the Synagogue, the prophet’s Bible study regime is ring-fenced with rigid codes, subtle manipulation, fear, threat, and weird misinterpretation of the Holy Bible. Months after Anneka Kinch’s embattled mind was won over with bitter lies, a new perverted dimension to her acculturation unfolded. She noticed regular assignations between the prophet and other young ladies. Many of them, both black and white had come from different countries in search of the miraculous but are being recruited into a sophisticated harem. They are being recruited into a nether world of sexual slavery. Naively, they become cannon fodders for the insatiable sexual appetite of a bearded Satan who masquerades as an angel of light and salvation.
Dazed, befuddled, and fooled, poor Anneka Kinch was caught in the intriguing sexual web of a prophet she believed with immovable conviction that he was God. She ran assignations several times to the penthouse bedroom of our prophet of doom. Interestingly, the prophet was able to make his sinful union chic, respectable and sought after with rich permutations of passing anointing through copulation with his female disciples! The prophet believes in false cross-fertilisation. Christ knew better. He had no female disciples!
The Nigerian Pentecostal movement is presently embattled. Its umbrella regulator, the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, an impotent outfit, cannot pretend to be unaware of the dark dealings of the human mirage of Ikotun Egbe. Nigerian pastors, ministers, reverends, and priests are becoming spiritual aggressors who prey on the weak, the poor and the gullible. Many of them are aware of TBJ’s sexual depravity but sadly they are silent and have remained cowards behind the anesthetising security of the stained-glass windows. Even the most optimistic believers feel a slight frisson of trepidation that indicated the possibility of erosion of moral honesty, self-control, truth, and long suffering among the rank of our preachers. Majority of them continue to use immoral means to attain moral ends.
TBJ’s cable television, Emmanuel, has been used to spin and burnish his pastoral image as the saviour of the blind, the lame, the widow, the widower and the unemployed.
The spiritual hubris engulfing the Nigerian churches clearly shows how easily pastors, prophets, evangelists, apostles, and reverends with empty vision can capsize destiny as in the case of Anneka Kinch. Rather than settle for benign complacency and suffer ongoing sexual mutilations, Anneka Kinch made a dash for freedom. Back home in the UK, it took months for the mist of her spiritual misadventure to clear. Then she woke up and suddenly realised that she had been delivered from a cult.
This piece was written in 2008.