Part Two: TB Joshua: The Evangelical Pastor Who Built His Own Hell

Robert and Miles get to the nightmare heart of the TB Joshua story: a sprawling empire of sexual violence and gaslighting on an epic scale.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about illness
by the sickest man in podcasting, Robert evans Uh. We're
recording this about a week after our TV Joshua Part
one episodes with the Great Miles Gray. Miles take an
audio bow. Wow, what a bow, beautiful microphone. I'm technically better,

(00:30):
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
when your sinuses get completely fucked. So I'm feeling great.
Miles how Yeah, yeah, I'm always putting silver in various parts.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Do you watch sorry, did you watch that documentary?

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Miles?

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah? Any any time?

Speaker 4 (01:00):
He was a crip.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
My favorite thing is people taking quack medicine that turns
them different colors. Dude, that's it's so good. Every time
it's funny.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
I 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. She was in
the bed. Yeah, I said, just like the energy of
playing guitar for a corpse like that.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
You're like, oh, this is what's the BES needs.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
It was mean mile when they were wheeling her through
that the whole thing was out of whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Anyway, it was great because it led me after I
was watching it with friends and afterwards we were very
much like, well, I still want more cult content, and
we we found fucking I think it was Netflix. We
were on I forget whatever thing we were on. The
algorithm was like this. It was here's a show about
like this commune that might be a cult or might not.

(02:08):
It was like a mystery show and 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's it immediately transitions to being a reality show fully,
and I was like, they tricked us. They tricked us
in the thinking that we were watching like a documentary

(02:28):
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 bitches. This is this country, this fucking country. Horrible
speaking of this country. You know it's not this country, Miles.

(02:49):
Where Nigeria? Yes, yeah, you know. I'm not an expert
on Nigeria. The of my research suggests different country than
than we live. And to be honest, thank you, I
thought it was good.

Speaker 4 (03:01):
It connected with the main thought.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
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 gonna say
every cult leader, but a lot of them do, right.
Al Ron Hubbard was the Commodore because he loved navies
and making people pretend to be in his navy. Keith

(03:25):
Rniery was known as Vanguard to his followers. I had
a beance joke in here, but I really like, why
would I that? I don't need I don't need that
kind of game. We're gonna bleep it out anyway, like
they did in that Donald Glover's show, Sophie. So it's fine, right. So,
in keeping with the fact that he was a general

(03:46):
creep and monster TV, Joshua had the most unsettling cult
leader nickname imaginable Daddy. That's just mm, that's the good stuff.
Not like their father sometimes too, but like Daddy specifically
is what most of his followers refer to a mass,
which is just an extra level I don't know why
it's worse than Father. I guess it's not. Maybe it's

(04:09):
just like exposure because of the Catholic Church. We're all
used to religious figures being father, like.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
Daddy is creepy, right, No, Daddy is because it's like
it's juvenile, but also there's it's sexually charged in different.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah yeah, 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.

Speaker 4 (04:32):
Why did first?

Speaker 3 (04:32):
Second, I forgot I was on behind the Bastards, and
I was like, oh, I finally said, chill, We're just
like we're just gonna talk about Mother God. And then
I'm like, oh, that's right, we're talking about TV. Fucking
Joshua again. We wait, I thought I was watching a
Netflix documentary about a cult and now I'm on a
fucking reality show.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
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

(05:11):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
Is there coidal silver at the very least in this one?

Speaker 2 (05:19):
There 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 in stuff. Yeah, I'm still in Yeah. Uh,
you're contractually obligated to be. We have we have ironclad
tracks with our kids. Hey, don't don't reveal the process here.

Speaker 4 (05:38):
I know I'm locked in.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
We're represented by one of those Epstein lawyers, and it's
it's just anyway. Speaking of abusive relationships, let's talk about
the tale of one of TV Joshua's followers. Ray Ray
is an english woman. She Brighton, England, where she went

(06:01):
to university for Nigeria. In the winter of two thousand
and two, she traveled there with a friend to see TB. Joshua. Now,
both Ray and her friend were strict Christians who had
seen videos of TV 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

(06:22):
don't know the way that like, you know, back in
the early odd's, late nineties, like punk bands, you'd get
like some burnt like you 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 yeah, 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 sixteen, so a couple of years

(06:44):
before she went over there, and quote the whole room
went completely still when they first watched TV Joshua cure people. Now,
it's one thing to say these people were convinced that
TV 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 TV Joshua's foreign volunteers was homosexual, and because of

(07:08):
the religious environment she was raised in and the time again,
you got to remember, this is the early two thousands,
were 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

(07:30):
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 you know.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
Yeah, he's like fixing this guy's like leg or whatever
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 Letter told him it later
told an I thought, well, maybe this is the answer
to my problems. Maybe this man can straighten me out,

(08:04):
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 I report

(08:26):
states neither Ray nor many of the young people who
left their home countries to meet Joshua in the early
two thousands paid.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
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 insiders 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

(08:53):
in the industry because there's so many people coming back home. Right,
he's a good business man, right, evil business man, but
most goodness susmitter evils.

Speaker 4 (09:02):
So yeah, there's no.

Speaker 3 (09:03):
Yeah, you can't make the line go up unless you
have truly despicable aliams or are You're just like no,
I'm just good at getting the people here and making
the money.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
And the line is going up for Scone.

Speaker 4 (09:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
Bisola, a Nigerian woman who spent fourteen years inside these
Scone compounds, 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

(09:35):
you were coming from. And this brings us to how
he treated members of the Nigerian LGBTQ community. I'm going
to quote from an article by Open Democracy here. Hans
Lean 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 LGBTQ people are

(09:57):
bad spirits blocking prosperity. Parents from poor communities bring their
children that are lgbtiq' identifying to Joshua's services and the
hope that their bad omen child will be turned into
something good and they will start to have good luck
and prosperity, says David's who is a former reverend with
the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa. And so again

(10:17):
for kids like Ray, the preacher 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

(10:39):
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,
Which we're just using.

Speaker 4 (10:53):
Different motivators to get people there, right.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
And it showcases that this is someone with a pretty
keen understanding of both cultures. He understands 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 now, This gets us to another interesting difference between
sorry and I think like it's kind of key to

(11:17):
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

(11:37):
family will be prosperous. But he does this sort of
thing that's very common in the US among prosperity gospel churches,
where you have to tie a huge chunk of your income.
He asks for ten percent 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 US all the time. You have to

(11:58):
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. I'm one of God's
official agents, man, So here's a deal. Give me about
like ten give me a ten percent kind of your shit.
I'll fucking tell God, Yo, make sure you hooked them
up this month, and we're good. We're good. So, over
the first twenty or so years of operations, gone perfected

(12:22):
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 two 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. TV Joshua's agents would comb logos for people

(12:43):
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 will 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

(13:06):
being prayed over right. They were gaslighting people into believing
that they had been cured.

Speaker 3 (13:13):
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 and they're fucking yogurt.

Speaker 4 (13:21):
And then yeah, wow.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
Because if you've got you know, because of you know,
the water, the lack of good water, and a lot
of especially these poor communities. Yeah, there are a lot
of people with with parasitical and with that sort of shit,
with these certain sorts of like intestinal parasites. Once you
get people good medicine, the degree to which people like
improve is it will it does feel magical. I fel
like you don't know what's being done right right, Like

(13:46):
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 because this is an HIV.

Speaker 4 (14:01):
They're like, yo, don't do the meds. Just pray, just pray.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
This is 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.

Speaker 3 (14:13):
Yeah, because you're completely you're using the their own distress
over their their health to then like supercharge your shitty
belief factory to then be like, yeah, man, I'm gonna
take your stress about this, and I'm going to convert
that into just devotion to what I'm telling you, and yeah,
staying in line and promoting my message all the while

(14:36):
when it's like.

Speaker 4 (14:37):
Yeah, I just gave you fucking a Marxis cylind or whatever.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
Yeah right, yeah, or literally like I've remect them. I'm
sure that is like what we're giving them a lot
of times because it's it's an effective anti parasitic Yeah.
Also for com Yeah, and also for of course here's
COVID poidal silver too. Yeah. Yeah, I just you know, myles,
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 an extended

(15:02):
really capsule. But yes, he's eating silver bullets.

Speaker 4 (15:09):
No, I need those for werewolf's minds. Yeah, that's true.
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to spread this information on
the show.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
It gets a lot worse somehow. So I mentioned last
episode that given Nigeria's problems with HIV, a lot of
TV 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, so they opted to go and obviously, like

(15:37):
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 that's
a potential danger.

Speaker 5 (15:47):
Right.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
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 they've tested positive
for HIV and then curing them having them go get
a real HIV test and an actual clinic and it

(16:08):
comes back negative because they were not sick fucking out
of here, you know, right, that's so fucking evil, Holy shit, Jesus,
every this is such a different kind of bastard.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
You know, like the past, we've talked about all kinds
of Nazis, child abusers, just general edgett. 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.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
It is, it's it's.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
And it's fucking it's fucking with me that like he's like, no,
this is what you gotta do.

Speaker 4 (16:43):
You get the people who don't have it.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
It's get them. If 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 why I
think it's key to understand stuff like this because it's
so easy, especially when people talk about cults like this

(17:07):
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 US 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

(17:29):
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, they by

(17:51):
TV 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.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
Half right, you know, like, yeah, that's an insane thing
they have to deal with.

Speaker 4 (18:04):
Yeah, that's what makes it, I guess.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
Yeah, it's just doubly vile because you're already you're already
taking advantage of the inequity that exists within your country.

Speaker 4 (18:13):
To then be like, yea, let me just exacerbate this
even more.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Yeah, it's like one of the most comprehensively evil things
I've ever heard of someone doing.

Speaker 4 (18:21):
It's it's pretty bad.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah, But you know what isn't comprehensively evil, Miles, It's
just a little evil. Tell me the sponsors of this podcast. Okay, yeah, yeah,
that's our guarantee. Just a little evil. Ah, We're back.

(18:43):
So put up against all of this perfectly managed spectacle,
confused young people in their teens and twenties, 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 discuss in the story of our friend Ray.
When Ray landed in the seething heat of Lagos, she

(19:04):
saw miracles. Two 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.

(19:26):
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 here, 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

(19:47):
and shit when they didn't, you know, do things because
he's you know, he's an abusive asshole, right in addition
to being just calculated evil. We don't know how many
of these women there were, at least dozens. Most 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,

(20:08):
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 worshippers, school shops,

(20:29):
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 TV Joshua, and so

(20:51):
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,

(21:12):
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 TB. Joshua, who seems to have
had no desire himself to father multiple children. He does

(21:33):
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

(21:55):
consistent a thing this was for him, TB. Joshua's evangelical
Christian compound had a secret on site abortion clinic just
to service his victims. WHOA, yeah, oh my god, yeah
it see okay, yeah, yeah. He has like an underground

(22:16):
abortion clinic in this like little city that he's built
just like for his victims.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
Right, and all the money that he's raking in just
goes to creating this like bubbled reality city to do this.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Kind of shit in yeah, where he exercises total control.
And when I say abortion clinic, don't picture a clean,
competent plant parenthood facility. TB. 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,

(22:49):
and thus he saw the procedure not just as necessary
for his own benefit, but as a punishment for them, right.

Speaker 3 (22:56):
Holy shit, Like because they like, how dare you get
again exactly unprotected sex?

Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, 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 preg That seems to
be from the way they talk about it. That seems
to be how he treated this, right, Okay. Jessica Kimu,
who is one of his African victims. She's from Namibia,
says that she was taken by Joshua at age seventeen,

(23:25):
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

(23:46):
this clinic of his. And 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. You know, he has
had more important things to handle.

Speaker 4 (24:06):
Yeah, he's taking medical diagnoses.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah right. TB. 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

(24:31):
locked alone in a room at one point for two
years and was visited only by TB. 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.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
And like it has it's like any conceivable way to
be a despicable person. He's like, Oh, like I'm engaged
in that too.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
Imprisonment, trafficking, a sexual assault, sexual violence, yeah, medical gas lighting,
like fucking literally anything.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
Yeah, and someone who's like because a lot of the
times it's like it's just like an 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.

Speaker 4 (25:46):
Yeah, that's when you're like.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
Yeah, it's like it's a completely different level, or not
a different level, but it's just a different level of severity.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
Yeah. Yeah. More common punishments were meted out to regular
followers or the prophets of people that he's not having
sex with. Right. These would include whipping with chains or horsewhips,
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

(26:15):
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

(26:38):
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 Hurst thirty

(27:02):
one says at first that he was love bombed, a
term that can be used to describe when culture group
shower or a g recruit with love and accolades to
get them to join. But when he became a Disciplehurst
said he saw the other side. Competition was fierced among
the two hundred or so disciples for Joshua's attention, and
they were encouraged to report each other for behaviors deemed wrong.
He said, Sinser confessed in front of others, recorded an
archived According to Hurst and other former disciples, passports are

(27:25):
taken along with novels and any medications, including mild painkillers
or malaria pills. Permission from Joshua in the form of
assigned pass is needed just to make a phone call
or email. Hurst 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.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
Is there, how many people like lived in that city.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
It's really unclear to me, at least hundreds. I think
it fluctuates over time, in part because the amount of
facilities available, and like an onion, right, you've got this
kind of the area closest to him living around him,
and 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,

(28:09):
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, that's certainly the way it feels for the
majority of people, I think who are contributing to this.

(28:29):
You know, the number of people it's it's it's a cult,
but it's not recognizable as being in a cult to
the majority of people who are aware of TV Joshua
and think that he's a man of God, right right, right,
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.

Speaker 4 (28:48):
You any fake COVID tests I can get.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Ye, yeah exactly, that's just exhausting. Obviously, this is only
possible because the Nigerian government was a full patsy to
TV 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

(29:15):
just for TV Joshua followers.

Speaker 4 (29:17):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
So yeah, this is a benefit for like the country.
You know, two ros do make a right exactly exactly,
that's ours. 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 twenty twenty four
as both a series of articles and a documentary that

(29:53):
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 twenty twenty
two was also fired at by the church's security and

(30:15):
was detained for a number of hours.

Speaker 3 (30:17):
Holy shit, Yeah, the state's involvement is only just in
so far, like it's just because of the bribes that
they're looking the other way or other people like in
like you know, Park, I think that's probably more than
just bribes. I would be surprised if no one was twined.
I would surprise if I'd be surprised if he wasn't
kicking other benefits to to some people, you know, right right,
I don't know that we have like a perfect context

(30:40):
for precisely how the relationship worked, Yeah, but it's clear
that they were.

Speaker 4 (30:43):
Like, no, we like we like tuberculosis, Joshua.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
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. So yeah, TV 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,

(31:09):
there is this risk that international condemnation might erupt, right,
you know, because you can't you can't bribe every government.
That's 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 the ones that come back
to hell. Yeah. And so how he would shield himself

(31:33):
from this was with the use of charities. Prior to
his death in twenty twenty one, any article about TV Joshua,
incredible outlets would note that he was controversial and they
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 maybe he's
faking miracles. I think based on a lot of the
articles I read prior to this, I think how you

(31:54):
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. Who's this? 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

(32:16):
expected to give about ten percent 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,

(32:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:01):
Right, right, he's doing a chevron here, dude, what are
you talking about?

Speaker 3 (33:05):
We're fucking the earth.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
I just told you.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
We just put up like seven fucking min windmills in
fucking Indiana.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
Man, what the.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
Fuck, dude, this isn't Why are you fucking with me?

Speaker 2 (33:13):
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

(33:34):
of this on his own, rather than being inspired by
other abusive organizations doing similar things.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
Right, I mean you know, it's not a lot of
foreign companies operate in Nigeria, so I'm sure. Yeah, 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 I was like.

Speaker 4 (33:56):
Oh, okay, I see how y'all do? Okay, Yeah, I
might be to use some of that in some of
my shit.

Speaker 5 (34:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
I mean, it's just like I think it's sort of
like a game, recognized game and like a fucked up
demonic predatory life.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
I'm like, oh wow, I'll take a little bit of that.

Speaker 4 (34:10):
I'll take a little bit of this.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, it's good stuff. So former Highwranking 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 TV Joshua for a little
bit of being a con artist worth hurting all of

(34:33):
these people? Right? How else are they going to get
the money? Right now? This didn't always work, and so
TB 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 worshippers.
And again, this is where you've got these like punishment

(34:54):
cells where he can lock people for behaving badly. And
I want to play you with clip from that BBC
documentary with his hours talking about how these places is run.

Speaker 5 (35:04):
There was a steming day that he used to abuse,
this woman said. The building of his purpastments, he designed
it God, the whole building was just designed to keep secret,
multiple doors, multiple entries and exits. The tacase you can

(35:28):
use to get to his five story was like four.
I call him, Lady properly wants to see you. He
would tell you the specific take is that this person
should come.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
He would always tell you which entrance to take, which
door to get into.

Speaker 5 (35:46):
He can ask the ladies to come try any of
the door so people don't see them. You would always
ask you when you come, did anybody see you?

Speaker 2 (35:58):
You bea looser?

Speaker 5 (36:00):
Then you grape me again.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
It was a process, a very nasty cycle we cauldn't
see it right under our nose. He designed a system
for deceiving all of us disciples.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
A lot of women were being abused by this man.
I had no idea. I thought I was the only one.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
I didn't know that that thing had happened to anybody else.
So that's pretty bad.

Speaker 4 (36:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
The guards who are running this hair in prison were
often teenagers themselves. They're said to have often been like
boys were sixteen, seventeen, fifteen 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
and part because they're younger and easier for him to influence. Right.

(36:54):
One of these boys after leaving told the BBC that
TV Joshua usually raped four to five in 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,

(37:14):
the fact that the root of TV josh was 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

(37:35):
don't know all of this. They don't know the extent
of what he's doing, but they.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
Know that he's taking the right right, right, that he's
just a bullshit artist, and that's right.

Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yes, and probably I'm sure they had some idea that
there was more going on, right, but certainly we're not
aware of like the full dimensions of it. But there
was resistance, and this kind of culminated in two thousand
and four in the Nigerian National Broadcasting Commission officially banning
the air ring of videos about of miracles that could
not be verified. Right, so you can't publish on television

(38:06):
unverified miracles. Now, what does it mean to verify a miracle?

Speaker 4 (38:10):
I was going to say, say, you.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
Get a blue check, this is a verifying 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 with his works. It doesn't wind up functioning
to actually stop him from putting out these miracle videos.

(38:33):
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 TV Joshua to

(38:55):
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, TV 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

(39:16):
should also say, all of these pastors who are supporting
the ban and who are against TV 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.

Speaker 4 (39:27):
Yeah, right right.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
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 TV Joshua quote.
According to him, the nation has reached the level where
people now have billboards with messages like comfort 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.

(39:50):
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 disease, 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.

Speaker 4 (40:07):
Dare you yeah, dare you yeah? That's God's department.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah, That's God's job. One preacher, Thomas Audu stated, as
a Christian, the Bible is the basis. I mean, 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

(40:31):
sides of it. Yeah, And I did find a very
fun quote from a guy who doesn't support the ban
that I actually un ironically agree with, although maybe not
in the way that that Reverend Henry Awonye meant it. Quote.
If they must ban miracles, they should also look into
some advertisements like alcohol, films, cigarettes, and movies that are

(40:51):
beyond the level of children. And yeah, I'm totally fine
with that. Let's bad adds to kids.

Speaker 4 (40:55):
Let's do it.

Speaker 3 (40:56):
That's the thing I love about people with bands. They're like, well,
if you ban this, you might as well ban the Bible.

Speaker 4 (41:03):
Yeah right.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
I don't believe in banning any particular book, but I
believe I'm fine with banning fake miracles on TV.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
Yeah. Yeah, but I'm saying 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 and whatever.

Speaker 4 (41:24):
You look for.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what's interesting to me about
this is this ban is clearly crafted to stop TV
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

(41:46):
so he makes kind of a seamless pivot. He launches
a satellite station, a manual 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 gonna start a fucking YouTube channel.
We'll get the videos out that way, We'll get him
out to even more fucking people. He is considered maybe, Uh,

(42:06):
there's definitely some expert qute in the BBC. Here's 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.

Speaker 3 (42:17):
God damn it, Like, is he ever gonna fucking slip up? Uh?

Speaker 2 (42:22):
I mean yes, but it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 4 (42:26):
Yeah right right, yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:28):
But it's like every single thing, it's like he but
like his instincts are just like spot on. It's like,
oh yeah, okay, can't I'll pivot to digital video, I'll
pivot to this.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
Yeah. The two thoughts you have reading about him is like,
what a monster? And also, man, this guy was fucking smart, Like, yeah,
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 a manual TV starts as like a satellite TV station,
but like they start up a YouTube account very quickly,

(43:00):
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 twenty fourteen,
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

(43:22):
the TV miracle ban. In twenty twelve, he was declared
one of the fifty 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.

Speaker 4 (43:42):
Know, yeah, yeah, I've heard of them.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
Yeah, I 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 worshippers with videos of people cured
of AIDS and other endemic illnesses with his holy water,

(44:06):
and then he started hawking it to crowds of people
at churches in Ghana, Sierra Leone and elsewhere in a
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

(44:26):
that's good. This guy continued, It's like in Jesus's 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

(44:47):
he was not charging people.

Speaker 3 (44:49):
No, that was kind of the whole thing. It was like,
here's just I mean, for lack of a better word,
he's hooking people up, you know, yeah, just because.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
Striking things attached to his phone that starts asking you
for tips.

Speaker 3 (45:01):
He's like, all right, what's going on? What's his dude's name, Lazarus?
Hold on what y'all want?

Speaker 4 (45:05):
Oh? Hold on, hold on, man, he's gonna.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
Sell me that paper table taped over the stigmadel hole
in his hand. That's got a venmo qr codes.

Speaker 4 (45:13):
The stigmata is a QR code.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
The stigmata is Yeah, just scan this nail.

Speaker 3 (45:21):
Size hole right there.

Speaker 4 (45:22):
Uh huh, there you go.

Speaker 3 (45:23):
Now, yeah, I can get your boy las up real quick.

Speaker 4 (45:26):
You know what I mean. But that's just gonna look
like five. That's like five rex all right.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
So, like any good business man, TV 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 gonna quote from an article in The Guardian. Here
the worshippers were hoping to obtain Holy New anointing water,
which a manual TV had announced would be distributed for free.

(45:54):
The anointing water usually costs eighty seti's, but we learned
on Sunday that it would be given out for free.
Said Joseph Adenvoor fifty two, who witnessed the fatal stampede.
I have never seen anything like it before. People had
come from Togo, been in 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. The police who are

(46:16):
investigating the deaths so that they had not anticipated the
number of people who would attend the church and worshipers
arriving with as early as two am. All of us
were caught by surprise. Police spokesman Freemonteta told the BBC
World Service, no one knew the crowd will be so huge.
Four people died and more than thirty were injured. So
you know, good, I get stuff now.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
In this one, he took a lesson out of like
hype beast, like Black Friday, doorbuster sale culture.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
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 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 because he doesn't warn authorities,
you know, right, Yeah, It's like it's like if the

(47:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
President's like, yeah, man, we can we'll forgive your debt. First,
fifty people here forgiven your debt.

Speaker 4 (47:19):
Yeah, I'll give you.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
I'll give you like a passport too. How far away
could we possibly be from that?

Speaker 4 (47:25):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Oh god, God, I don't want to think about I
don't want to think that too far.

Speaker 4 (47:31):
In the future.

Speaker 2 (47:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're good. Let's just stick to twenty fourteen,
when in a Bola outbreak ravage sections of West Africa,
and government officials had to go to TV 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,

(47:54):
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 that's just gonna spread
a Bola to the fucking capital, right Yeah. And I
will say TV Joshua was a rational and a person
to be like, well, yeah, that's probably not good for anybody.
That's probably gonna be bad for me if that.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
Yeah, He's like, I'm gonna be at the Prime Minister's
house tomorrow hooking people up.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Come through. He does cancel a bunch of upcoming healing sessions,
which is the minimum he could have done, but he
also sends four thousand bottles of anointing water to Sierra
Leone with a claim that it would cure anyone suffering
from a bola. The water was flown in on a
private jet that cost as much to make the trip
as the cash donation TV Joshua's church made to buy
food for victims of a Bola from an article in

(48:43):
The Independent Quote. The preacher's TV channel, Emmanual dot TV
showed video of a man called Joe Faya Numa, who
claims to represent Sierra Leone's High Commission, accepting the donation.
Numa 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 Abola?

Speaker 3 (49:05):
Yeah and yeah, and turn it into a little bit
of marketing.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
Yeah, a little bit of marketing. Now, miles, you know
who can cure your abola. The only people who can
cure your abola the good folks at who make Yeah,
so uh, you know, purchase it.

Speaker 4 (49:28):
We're back.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
Like all true prophets, TV 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 in retrospect death of Michael Jackson.
Starting in January two thousand and nine, he told his
followers to expect the death of a great star when
the King of Pop died a mere six months later,

(49:50):
he told everyone that's who I was referring to all along.
And this is a he does this a lot.

Speaker 3 (49:56):
This.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
This is one of the more fun bits of TV
Joshua lore, like Bob of.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
Wanga type shit, where it's yeah, like, oh, you're in there.
We got something coming this year, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
In January twenty thirteen, 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 trapnel
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

(50:27):
subject to a deadly attack that happens like every week
or so.

Speaker 4 (50:30):
Yeah, one way to be fair.

Speaker 3 (50:32):
Yeah, and even flame like at the rate of forest fires,
Like you're lucky to you know, get at least a
couple of year, you can claim.

Speaker 2 (50:38):
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.

Speaker 4 (50:46):
There's their own health care system.

Speaker 2 (50:47):
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

(51:09):
affect many. Two years later, Isis militants carry out a
series of attacks on the Botoclon nightclub in areas around
it in Paris, killing like one hundred something people. And
he's like, this is what I was referring to two
years previously ago. Just like yeah, like, France is a
big country. If you're like, sometime in the next two years,
a bad thing will happen in France, it will.

Speaker 4 (51:32):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's probability at that point.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
But hey, he's you know, he's seeing things he is
as an intermediary.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
One of his few fuck ups is in twenty sixteen,
he calls the US presidential election for Hillary Clinton. Now, ah, man,
I know what you're saying, Miles, I'm pretty sure Hillary
Clinton did not in fact win the twenty.

Speaker 4 (51:54):
Sixteen Hillary one. Hillary won, the election was stolen.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
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. TV Joshua has set his prophecy on
US 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 Ikuotun,

(52:20):
Lagos and Sunday, Prophet TV 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 Applaus from Sky. Literally he's like, Oh, you just
don't get how right I was because I'm built different. Baby.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
Yeah, that's on you.

Speaker 4 (52:42):
I'm sorry, I can't.

Speaker 3 (52:43):
I can't get you up to this level you Yeah,
or just kind of like the dude from Big Lebowski's like, yeah,
that's just like your opinion, man.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
Yeah, yeah, God, that's good. That's just that's just quality
shit right there, Miles.

Speaker 4 (52:56):
Yeah, that's shiitthousery to the maximum right there.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Now. By far, TV 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, twenty sixteen, he proticts a massive terrorist
attack in Ghana, which provokes widespread panic among people in
Ghana and like the police and security surface services have
to keep issuing assurance as being like, we have no

(53:22):
evidence that anything is wrong. Police, don't panic that you're
about to die because of what the 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

(53:42):
add this to my list of correct prophecies. Who gives
a shit if it causes a panic in the short term, right.

Speaker 4 (53:47):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
Yeah. He made a similar prophecy later in twenty sixteen,
warning that South Africa's Orlando Stadium would be the site
of a massive terrorist attack during an upcoming rap concert.
Didicted twelve thousand deaths from this attack. Nothing that's your called.
I think he was getting He's kind of he's getting
sloppy at this point. That's what the hell would they

(54:10):
do that?

Speaker 4 (54:11):
Like, yeah, come on, babe, Ruth, Yeah, you're not them all.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
What would the what what weapon would even cause a
death toll like that? That's four nine elevens right? How?

Speaker 3 (54:20):
And like, what's the capacity of that stadium? He's basically
saying like a third of it or whatever? How many people?

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Like, it's a big stadium, you could certainly hold more
people than that, But how would you kill everyone in
the stadium? Yeah, and right, like why a rap vocal
haram isis neither of them have access to that kind
of weaponry.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
Wait, but what's the like he said a rap concert?
Like was that meant to be? Like a specific artist?
There was a rap concert right right?

Speaker 4 (54:45):
Right?

Speaker 2 (54:45):
I don't know why I'm not enoe of an expert
on like the dynamics of the rap industry in Nigeria
and how it relates to the evangelical movement to know
if there was more going on?

Speaker 3 (54:55):
Right, well, this is South Africa. Maybe he wasn't a
fan of deantword.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
Yeah, maybe who could blame him for that? We all
saw that fucking movie?

Speaker 4 (55:05):
Right, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
Good god?

Speaker 3 (55:10):
Was it?

Speaker 2 (55:10):
Chappy? My god? That's the real crime making champy?

Speaker 4 (55:16):
Why why did they allow them in here?

Speaker 3 (55:17):
Also, he's like the guy's a monster and the girls
a Nepo baby.

Speaker 4 (55:21):
Apparently I ain't hip hop.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
I haven't kept up with Dean Twards since that movie.
Why William?

Speaker 3 (55:29):
I think I think you you may be able to
do an episode on them?

Speaker 2 (55:32):
Oh good, okay, cool, that'll be fun. Yeah. So obviously
twelve thousand 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, so you
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.

Speaker 4 (55:50):
This, right, my god.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
So by twenty fourteen, TV Joshua was forty nine years
old and worth I think the estimates of his wealth
are all fucked because they usually say ten to fifteen
million dollars, but like, he has a private jet that's
worth like sixty million dollars. 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.

(56:14):
I don't think. I don't think you're noteworthy among that
crowd at ten to fifteen million dollars. No, that's like
what their gardeners make. Yeah, exactly, my steriously. Yeah, your
daughter's your gardener. Yeahah yeah, I'm gonna guess he has
a lot more cash than this. But he's just smart
about like he is about most things about like protecting.

Speaker 4 (56:36):
Yeah, his presentation of it all.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
Yeah, yeah, he has a lot more to hide than
just money. This kind of prison harem conflex. 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, scone

(57:00):
keeps growing and he's like, I want to make this
building taller, so add another couple of stories to the top.
There all designed 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 governments and architects to ignore that,
like nothing is being done up to spec and this

(57:21):
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.

Speaker 3 (57:29):
Ata, 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.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
Yeah, yeah, you're a big 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
got to kill a lot of people.

Speaker 3 (57:49):
You know who else they said, couldn't keep adding stories.

Speaker 4 (57:52):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (57:53):
Jesus Christ. And then we got the Book of Revelations.

Speaker 3 (57:56):
Praise to now scan my stigmanor.

Speaker 2 (58:00):
For someation. 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 hot.

Speaker 3 (58:12):
Wait, so what was it built for and what are
the building?

Speaker 5 (58:15):
Ends?

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Were stories? And it winds up being six So they've
got like fifty percent more weight on that foundation than
it should have, and one has to assume other corners
are being cut to. 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.

(58:35):
Followers reported that the staircases and the building around the
staircases would wobble when you went up, which is a
bad sign on something.

Speaker 4 (58:44):
You've ever been on a wobbly staircase?

Speaker 2 (58:46):
No, now, fuck that shit. I mean maybe if I was.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
Like tripping or something, maybe I've been on a few while,
but like never in my right frame of mind.

Speaker 2 (58:55):
And yeah, firmly in reality. No, yeah, it's you. You
would not want to be in a building like this.
On September twelfth, twenty fourteen, one of TV Joshua's disciples
warned him that the structure of the building was showing
imminent signs of failure. He ignored the warning and ordered
two hundred foreign visitors, mostly South Africans, into the ground
floor dining room so that they could eat lunch. Two

(59:17):
hours later, the building collapsed, and the video of this
like it looks like you know, if you've seen like
nine to eleven 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's just like, yeah, it pancakes.

Speaker 3 (59:31):
You know.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
If you remember back in Florida, there was that condo
building a few years back, it looked a lot like
that where it's just down. Dozens, perhaps more than one hundred,
were killed instantly. More than eight hundred people are also
trapped inside. These numbers are really vague. We have no
idea how many people were in the building when it collapsed,

(59:53):
or how many died. Really because first responders are blocked
from entering the compound itself for twenty four four hours,
right what he attempts to have his own people carry
out the rescue efforts and blocks the government from entering.

Speaker 4 (01:00:09):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
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 a manual visually shaken during his interview. He is

(01:00:31):
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 twenty four hour period where he's kept the
authorities out, that some of his followers are ordered to
drive vanloads full of corpses out of the compound to
be buried in secret. What we can verify is a

(01:00:54):
death toll of at least one hundred and sixteen.

Speaker 4 (01:00:58):
Sh what can be fair ify?

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Yeah, yeah, almost certainly more than that. How much more
is unclear, but like that's a lot, you know, that's
all out on its own, a really bad disaster, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
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 that night.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
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 TB. Joshua
will be personally charged. But once again he bribed local
officials and reporters and nothing was done to placate his
own followers. TB. Joshua turned towards the well worn authoritarian

(01:01:40):
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 try to put
this away is to claim that Boko Haram had carried
out a terrorist tack to destroy the building. It wasn't

(01:02:02):
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 claim to
show either Nigerian government or terrorist Boco Horam jets flying
over the complex before the structure failed.

Speaker 3 (01:02:17):
No, yeah, they're doing like he doesn't Alex Jones, and
they're they're putting like it was doctored footage or that's
what they're just saying, like they have a count I.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:02:44):
Building, right, And I'm sorry, that's a Boco Haram fighter jet.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Yeah, and that really think Boco Haram have fighter jets.
I'm sure they've got some like planes like prop planes
and shit, you know, they're not a tidy organization. But
I don't think there of carrying out an aerial bombing
on the capital of Lagos. I think that's beyond Boko
Haram's capacity.

Speaker 3 (01:03:06):
Yeah, and I think, yeah, the Nigerian government may have
something to say to if that actually happened.

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
Yeah, I think the Nigerian government probably say something like
Boko Haram did care. I believe they carried 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

(01:03:33):
making money to this day. But on June fifth, twenty
twenty one, right after carrying out a life broadcast, TB.
Joshua dropped dead. He was fifty seven 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. Yeah, maybe he had cancer, maybe he had
like a hard condition, who knows. I don't. It's not
clear to me that we will ever know precisely, but

(01:03:55):
thankfully he's fucking dead.

Speaker 4 (01:03:56):
Yeah. The one thing we know is that it wasn't karma,
because the case of these.

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
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,
I mean, it's good that he's dead, but it took
God took a sweet time on this one. He has
a massive funeral, obviously well attended by local celebrities and politicians.

(01:04:28):
An enormous crowd marches his coffin through the streets. His wife, Evelyn,
has taken over scone and 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 Pentecostals 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.

(01:04:52):
And yeah, TB. Joshua never really brought to justice for
his crimes, so that's cool. Maybe something will happen to
Evelyn now that some of this stuff is come out,
But I don't have a ton of faith in it
in that No, No.

Speaker 3 (01:05:03):
Yeah, Seldom the bad guys seem.

Speaker 4 (01:05:05):
To win a lot, yes, yeah, a weird way. But
who knows, Maybe maybe that'll change, Maybe that'll change.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Maybe that. Yeah, maybe we'll finally get a handle on
the human race this year. Maybe this will be the one,
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:05:18):
Yeah, yeah, we're starting not strong, this is Yes, it's
been a good year so far.

Speaker 2 (01:05:22):
Yeah, it 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.

Speaker 3 (01:05:33):
Yeah, thank you so much again for listening to me
right now. And I will I will count on your
continued support with my miss my missionary my mission church
evangelicalism podcast called The Daily Zeitgeist. It's about news, politics, comedy,
and and just a little bit of good old christ
talk too. Uh So checking that every day. Uh and

(01:05:56):
also check out Silvermiles dot net where you can pick
up some of my blessed vials of colloidal silver.

Speaker 4 (01:06:05):
Uh and you can.

Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
It cures honestly everything, like I don't even have to
tell you because it literally heres.

Speaker 2 (01:06:10):
Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
So okay, Wow, that's very responsible, Miles.

Speaker 3 (01:06:23):
Yeah, it'll make you a better freestyle wrapper. Yeah, graffiti,
it does it all, it doesn't all.

Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
Yeah. And I'm gonna go ahead and say it'll cure
your syphilis. So don't go to the doctor if you
get syphilist because silver Miles dot Net. Anyway, Sophie, Uh,
we're not still sponsored by the by Big Syphilis, are we?
All right now big s Yeah? All right, then avoid

(01:06:51):
catching syphilis until they pay us.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
Behind the Bastards is a production a cool Zone. Need
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