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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. This episode also includes very strong language.
We've watched hours of TB Joshua's miracle videos. These are often very graphic accounts of miraculous healings. Not only asthma, but diabetes and cancer, including the exploding testicles you heard in the first episode. Oh God, I want to be sick.
In some videos, medical doctors claim these miracles happened to them. The Prophet Joshua put his hands on my ears and he prayed for me. The next minute, my hearing came back. Even Ray, who spent 12 years as a disciple, doesn't fully understand how TB Joshua was able to perform these healing miracles.
It was really hard to explain how did that happen? How did they get that on camera? People who'd got breast cysts suddenly bursting for the camera and stuff that was happening pretty much on command in terms of someone stretching their hand out. TB Josh was not the first pastor to pray for people to be healed. Many churches, not just the Synagogue Church of All Nations, are built on the promise of miracles. And that's also true of many religions, not just Christianity.
And TB Joshua's reputation was built on him being a healer. It's why people flocked to him. The miracles, and I'd witnessed them firsthand, and that was his hook, is what hooked me. That faith in him persuaded people to stop taking their medication. You've got a medical report here, can you please just show the camera there? And that faith also made him rich. Praise be to God, negative tested for HIV and...
From the BBC, this is World of Secrets. Season two, The Disciples. A BBC World Service investigation. With me, Yemi Siadegoke. And me, Charlie Northcutt. Episode six, Miracle Machine. When you watch TB Joshua's miracles, they can look so convincing. Thousands of people, perhaps millions, were persuaded that they were real.
But not everyone. It's a bit odd interviewing someone I've worked with. Adajuan was a mentor to me when I first moved to Nigeria, and he's guided me through doing investigative journalism in the region for a really long time.
And Adijuan was on the ground in Nigeria when TB Joshua's church was growing rapidly. You heard a bit from him in the first episode. I'm a journalist who has been practicing since 1999. For the most part, I've been involved in a lot of investigative reporting. And one of his investigations looked into TB Joshua. While he was working, Adijuan says a family member, a cousin, got sick.
They said he had a pain, felt a sharp pain in his tummy. Rather than take him to the hospital, they were applying his medication at home for a while. And then somebody suggested to them that this must be a spiritual attack and that it was best to take him to TB Joshua's church. And they took him to TB Joshua's church. He felt that he was okay and he came back home. And then two days after that,
The pain was back again, and then the guy died. He died. It was becoming painfully clear to Adijuan that TB Joshua's medical claims were having a big impact on one illness more than others, HIV. My own beat in the investigation was to actually follow up on claims of medical cure. At that time, in this part of the world, in Nigeria...
HIV was such a big subject and it was at that time seen as literally a death sentence.
People didn't have the kind of knowledge that we now have about HIV and AIDS and the fact that you can actually live a normal, healthy life. At that time, there was a lot of stigmatization. And then, boom, there came this church that claimed that they were curing HIV. And by the special grace of God, all of them shall receive their healing. It is God's power demonstrating through senior prophet T.B. Joshua.
Praise be to God, negative tested for HIV and HIV too. So we followed up on some of these claims. One of them was a woman in southern Nigeria. And was said to have been HIV positive. And the pastor prayed for her and she had been cured. So I reached out to the lady and she said that yes, that she was cured. And presented his medical certificate to me.
claimed that she was HIV positive and later claimed that she was HIV negative. So I tracked the source of that medical certificate. Both results came from a fake institution that didn't exist. The HIV positive result was fake and therefore the negative result was also fake. And she wasn't the only one. Actually, as a team, I think we found about four or five of such claims that were fake.
But Adejuan's investigation did little to dent the reputation of TB Joshua's miracles. Back in Lagos, we wanted to get a sense of why people were so keen to believe TB Joshua really could be a healer. When TB Joshua's miracle videos first emerged in the 1990s, he pioneered the format.
creating a model which was soon copied by churches across the region. He was operating in a cultural and social context that was ripe for this kind of ministry. In Nigeria, people believe that they're not supposed to fall sick. Dr Adebayor has been practising medicine in Nigeria for 16 years. He's immaculately dressed and seemed excited to speak to us about a topic he's clearly very passionate about. So if there's something that looks like illness...
They'll first go to their religious leader. And when they do fall sick, they'll often be told it's demonic, not disease. Somebody has a fever. Malaria is endemic. I can fever be a demon. For most Nigerians, it's not a black and white thing to separate their traditional religious and scientific beliefs. Dr Adebayo's witnessed these conflicting beliefs time and time again, including from his own staff in the hospital.
He remembers one of them who for days had been quietly suffering from a pain in his arm. Eventually he found out that he was diabetic, but he didn't believe so. He felt strongly that it was a spiritual attack.
Even right now, he still doesn't believe it's more or less like us. I'm his boss. I'm looking like I'm forcing him to take the medical care. And all that, he still tells me that he wants to go back to the person praying for him and all of that. But that goes to show, because this is someone, you said it's a member of staff. Yes, yes. Someone who works in a medical field. Exactly. And that person is still not believing that this is, you know, a medical condition that requires medical treatment. You are a Christian also. Yes, I am. You're a doctor. Yes.
Do you find this type of stuff frustrating when you see that people are perhaps leaning on their faith but to the extent where they're actually putting their health at risk by not going to seek medical treatment? It's quite, it's really frustrating. I don't know, is there any other word bigger than frustrating? No, no, no. OK, it's really bad. Dr Adebayo has a number of stories about pastors in Nigeria convincing members of their congregation to stop seeking medical help. You'll hear reference to Daddy...
Again, this is a common term for pastors in Nigeria. In this example, it's not TB Joshua. There was a woman that had a big baby. She was a labour. We knew that the baby was already showing some signs and it was already showing obstruction that she couldn't have the baby. I said, let's go for the C-section. The baby would come out crying. This is the best time. Don't let it get worse. I noticed that she had a Bible under her pillow. She had a white handkerchief, which is usually called a mantel.
She was putting on her head, and there was this constant that she was on the call. Daddy, I believe you. Daddy, I believe you. That was our pastor.
telling her that, don't worry, you're going to deliver like the Hebrew women. There's that start of, don't worry, you're just going to deliver like Hebrew women. In context, there's a lot of stigma around women who get C-sections. So a lot of women will put themselves through excruciating pain and potential complications to give birth vaginally. Yes, they just say, I don't feel like a woman. That's what they say. I don't feel like a woman. I've got to go through labour and all of that. Finishing that story, hospital ethics, we can't force, we can only...
The baby died in a womb. And it turned out Dr Adebayo knew the pastor. When he next saw him, he couldn't keep quiet. When I saw the pastor, he's a pastor that I know. The two children, I did a caesarean section for his wife. I'm not joking. I'm not. Serious story. His kids were by a caesarean section. But he wanted to score a point. One of the things I said was...
Hearing these stories from Dr Adebayo makes you realise just how much power pastors have over their congregations.
People facing life and death decisions will often choose to believe their pastor rather than their doctor. How big is this problem, this problem of, you know, prophets and pastors, you know, telling people to stop taking medication and then dying or suffering complications? How big is the scale of this issue? Scale of zero to ten, I would say 99. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, it's bad.
For TB Joshua, people were travelling to his church for the miracles and healings in their droves. Up to 50,000 people attended his services each week. In September 2023, when we visit Lagos for this series, the impact of the church on local tourism is clear.
This was, or is still, one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country. And you can imagine that's thousands and thousands of people. Those people need places to stay, things to eat, they want to buy stuff. And you can see the industry that has popped up in this area around that. There are dozens of restaurants. You can see there's another bar here on the right. There are hotels and loads and loads of little shops. There's a strip club here somewhere.
When Ray first visited the church, it cost almost nothing to stay in TB Joshua's compound. But by the mid-2000s, that had changed. All the fees started going up.
for the accommodation and the food. Ray says TB Joshua realised there was good money to be made from the visitors. He would send people and say, go and see what they charge at a five-star hotel in America. I'm worth that. Like, they can't come here and expect God to give them something for nothing. But these people are staying in a dormitory.
They don't even have a toilet, like a door on their toilet. They've got like a plastic curtain. And these rooms were not worth the money people were paying for. He used to charge a lot of money.
Despite the basic accommodation, Jessica, the disciple from Namibia, says the visitors seemed happy. People were really just coming because of the experience and because of the drama that happens in the church, the deliverance and the healing. And people were also desperate for a solution. So they would pay this ridiculous amount to stay in average hostel rooms.
TB Joshua began to expand the church compound, buying more land to create guest houses for visitors, one of which was six storeys tall. By 2006, Nigerian newspapers were calling the synagogue church the biggest religious tourism site in West Africa. And TB Joshua had evolved his video production too, creating a fully-fledged 24/7 satellite TV channel.
called Emmanuel TV. Emmanuel TV, changing lives, changing nations, and changing the world. Jessica would go on to be one of the chief editors there. Emmanuel TV was very entertaining. What captivated me was the healing and then the deliverance of
And it was just drama. And it always seemed as if there was a solution towards the end. Thank you, Jesus. Hallelujah. Click here to subscribe to witness more of God's power. It was popular everywhere. That's why, you know, his logo was changing lives, changing nations and changing the world. And changing the world.
Because I remember when I first went to Nigeria, it was playing in the hotel lobbies. And then you'd drive down the street and you'd sometimes see the TV in a corner shop. And it would be playing Emmanuel TV. Was it exciting? To me, it felt like we were doing something bigger than us. We were doing it for daddy. It was also streamed live on YouTube. His services were some of the most watched Christian content on the platform, drawing millions.
During these services, people could donate live. Bisola, who was in charge of the church's finances, remembers the exact moment TB Joshua realised just how lucrative this approach was. When we started Emmanuel TV Partners, every Sunday while Emmanuel TV is on, that is when the partners will be giving money online, real time.
So after service, we take the balance sheets to him in his office. TB Joshua would stand from his chair and started laughing. Uwode, uwode, uwode, meaning that money has come, money has come. TB Joshua the healer was now also TB Joshua the businessman.
Huge amounts of money were spent on Prayer Mountain, building those huge walls and the helipad in the middle. But TB Joshua also had a private jet, which was valued at over 20 million US dollars. And details of some of TB Joshua's offshore accounts appeared in the Panama Papers. TB Joshua loving money. He loves money so much. The miracles were big business.
The Vantage Point.
from which to survey a new horizon. Search for The Documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Hey, I hear you think podcasts are all about true crime, huh? Well, wise guy, the iHeartRadio app's got all kinds of podcasts. We got stuff you should know and stuff they don't want you to know. We got Bobby Bones, Big Boy, and Lou Lader. We got SpongeBob Binge Pants and Exotic Erotic Storytime. We got Doughboys, Two Dudes in the Kitchen, Green Eggs and Dan. Hey, we got ElfQuest.
We got podcasts for everything on the iHeartRadio app for free. If you don't download that, well, that's not just a true crime, my friend. That's criminal. Millions of people believe TB Joshua's healing miracles are real. But according to the disciples we spoke to for this series, these extraordinary performances are little more than that. Behind the scenes, there's a team who specialised in this task.
A carefully orchestrated miracle machine. It's all arranged. Which included Bisola. It's all premeditated. Miracles were manipulated. I've not witnessed one, seriously. Even among the disciples, how the miracles were performed was a closely guarded secret. Information was siloed and only a handful understood how it was done.
In all, we've spoken to more than 30 church insiders for this podcast. You won't recognise all their voices, but together, for the first time, this is their explanation of how the miracles were faked.
Firstly, you fill in a form. And you write why you're coming there. Why do you need prayer? What's your problem? My duty at that time is to try and gain as much information as I can from you. When the prophecy comes, especially for the visitors, it will be so accurate and so precise, you will think, oh my God, because I've done all the work.
and a disciple also from South Africa. The emergency department were responsible for writing and approving the placards. The names of their ailments are written boldly on their placards. Someone would come and say, I've got a headache, and it would be written down as some other exaggerated condition. Here.
Paul, a disciple from Nigeria. Not knowing how to cure. But to know what they wouldn't be able to cure. By his wounds, she is healed.
Ambisola, who said that often, off-camera and sometimes without their knowledge, visitors were being given medicine. Those people are being fed medication. They give them drugs to get speedy recovery. We encourage them. The moment T.B. Joshua stretched his hand...
- Try and vomit. - I see him about to throw up. - They try, they scratch their throats, and they do their vomiting. Some people, they even vomit blood. - The people themselves are clearly being manipulated. They would be told, exaggerate their problems so that God can heal you, and exaggerate your healing so that God could perfect your healing. - You can see her doing what she could not over the button.
And then there's always the fixes that can be done in the edit. Bissola was the synagogue's chief video editor.
This is wonderful. This is extraordinary. You think that that thing just happened the same day. With her wound healed after just a few days. Some of them took a span of six months, one year. Things were being edited to look real. Of course, I edited a lot of things that I made to be real to the world. This is the power of God is played through his anointed servant.
According to the disciples, TB Joshua didn't just fake these miracles in Lagos. This is Singapore, 2006. Ray was here, reporting for TB Joshua on camera. What happened to you just now as Prophet TB Joshua came to you?
I received deliverance, total deliverance in Jesus' name. Thousands of people were packed in a stadium for the event, marketed as part of his national healing campaign. I remember, like, there was all these wheelchairs lined up and people with crutches. The marketing for the campaign had been so effective, dozens of injured and desperately sick people had gathered at the stadium, hoping TV Joshua might save them.
But among them were specifically chosen people, people the disciples knew were not as sick as they seemed. They had all been seen previously and they had to make sure that they could all walk. They were all lined up with their crutches and their wheelchairs and we had cameras on the ground. The job of the cameraman was to film these miracles live.
and then the rest of us needed to get instantaneous testimony from them. You feel now that God Almighty has set you free through Prophet TB Joshua. And a lot of this was broadcast onto the massive screens, so the whole stadium could see this happening live. The stadium had a capacity of about 25,000 people, and the majority of them seemed to have come to get various ailments healed.
So if you imagine you've gone there, you can't walk, and you see the person next to you start standing up, what does that do for you? It makes you believe it can happen for you. Bisola was there that day in Singapore too. He said he has released faith into the stadium, that by their faith they are being healed. I saw a lot of people from wheelchair. They thought maybe they were trying to stand up by faith. I saw a lot of people falling.
I was crying. I was crying for them. I was really crying for them. Similar events to the one you heard in Singapore were held by TB Joshua around the world. At them, it was often Ray who was the public face of the church. There's something we needed to ask her. In 2011, Ray was in London evangelising on behalf of TB Joshua. And she was about to be recorded by an undercover journalist. I know you have issues with this production.
Which production is it? Um, but we're gonna watch it anyway because... Which production is it? It's a moment in time. What production is this? I've been unwell for a very long time. Um, I have HIV.
God, I'm excited. How does that make you feel? Fuck! Sky News' report was looking into the danger of so-called healing ministries, and Ray was one of their targets. After recording Undercover,
The journalist confronted Ray to ask her about what she said. You told three of my friends now that through God you can cure HIV. Not me. I believe that God can cure HIV. Even knowing what she did from Singapore, years later Ray says she still believed TB Joshua was a healer. What we said to people was that if you believe in God, if you believe in Jesus and you believe wholeheartedly, you will be healed.
By this point, she'd been a disciple with TB Joshua's church for seven years. Seven years of sleep deprivation and surveillance. In the words of Ray, their minds had been altered. When you go through mind reform, you have no ability to look at information and make a sound judgment.
We asked Ray if being confronted by Sky made her reconsider her beliefs. It didn't make me reconsider because that's the problem with totalistic viewpoints. You have an answer to everything through the doctrine that has been used to essentially wash your brain.
These were people from the air quotes, the world, as we were taught. They were people who didn't understand God's power, didn't recognize God, didn't believe him. They were just part of all of the rest of the people that needed saving and bringing to Christ. It was almost like this weird kind of feeling sorry for them that they couldn't see the truth. And that was how everything was spun. And, you know, there wasn't, psychologically speaking, there wasn't a way out from that.
And so as far as you were concerned, you know, God was the healer and he could heal completely. All people needed to do was believe. You know, we really believed that we were giving a message of life and love and healing and wholeheartedly believed that these miracles were true. Like we had no idea that a lot of this stuff was kind of orchestrated and fake. We didn't know.
So it's very painful to realise that something that you thought was really good was actually really bad. And it hits your conscience. I wholeheartedly believe that, as ridiculous as it might sound now and as unscientific as it might sound now. At that time, I believed that message. I don't believe that anymore. There's lots of indications that many people potentially died because
as a result of TB Joshua's teaching and
the disciples played a key role in the apparatus of that message, the church services, the screenings, the placard writing, the filming, the editing. Everyone who played a part in that place played a role in that message. And how do you guys all feel having been involved in that now? And what do you think of the scale of potential scale of...
of that tragedy too, over potential loss of life. I think outwardly I feel angry. I feel angry on behalf of everyone. I feel angry for myself. I feel angry for other people that came into contact with him. I feel just deeply used and deceived.
That's part of like what makes this story so tragic because so many people were sort of moved by wanting to do good and having it be warped in such an awful way and sort of harming people unintentionally. How do you kind of wrestle with that guilt or how do you deal with it? I don't feel guilty because, and that doesn't mean that I don't have to be accountable or I don't have to be responsible or I don't have to own up.
I know that for myself, I was one of many people that were victims there who was used. Back in England, members of Matt McNaught's church were travelling to Lagos inspired by the healing message with devastating consequences. We met Matt at the site of his former church, Emmanuel, in Winchester. Because it was where the very kind of intimate gatherings were, like the youth groups, the prayer meetings.
Matt recalls when a member of his congregation, a woman in her 40s with cancer, travelled to TB Joshua's church. She returned and cancelled an operation to have a tumour removed. I do distinctly remember the excitement and joy with which she shared the news that she had been declared healed. I just remember just being utterly dismayed. And I knew that she had a chance of living if she didn't.
go down that path and yeah she died. Despite this she wasn't the last to go. I think that that has played out many times that people have come for healing not being healed but being told they have been healed. I know of disciples who have lost close relatives to preventable deaths that he was supposed to have healed and yet they've become disciples after this experience.
How can he have so much hold that that kind of failure to heal is interpreted not as a failure? And of course, the only other explanation is that they just weren't good enough Christians, faithful enough to be healed. This is a particularly harmful belief that I've heard many times before. If you aren't healed, you don't believe enough. You simply don't have enough faith. And there's one case that Matt still thinks about all the time.
And that's the case of his pastor. He was like this figure of real wisdom, you know, like he was a real kind of a father figure. You know, he was a good man. There was certainly wisdom that he had. Matt says his pastor was declared terminally ill. Like other members of the congregation, he turned to T.P. Joshua for help. He went back twice. So he was very unwell.
He came back to Nigeria a second time to get re-healed or whatever. I don't know what the rationale was. He believed, and I think was led to believe by TB Joshua and his supporters, that taking any medication was a sign of doubt, even if it's palliative, you know, painkillers, things like that. I think there's something very cruel about the extent of his suffering. So for a long time he refused to take painkillers.
Did you see him suffering? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he... Yeah, he was in a lot of... I mean, yeah, in a lot of pain. I just have a distinct memory of seeing him. I went to the doctor's surgery for something. I was sitting in the waiting room and I just saw him pacing up and down the waiting room, just completely thin, absolutely tense with pain, and I avoided it.
his, you know, gaze. And I kept myself to myself and hoped he didn't see me. And by then I was just, I didn't believe in any of this. And it just grieved me so much to see. And actually approaching his own mortality in such a spirit of just, I mean, just struggle. People died after being told they were healed and they were persuaded to stop taking medication that could have saved them. And, you know, that's potentially...
hundreds, some people estimate potentially thousands of people misled in that way. Absolutely, and I don't believe in evil in a metaphysical sense, I don't think T.B. Joshua is evil like the Antichrist, but I do believe in evil deeds, things that people do that cause
utterly preventable and cruel suffering. There's a kind of horrible irony to it in that, you know, the community we had in Emmanuel was such that the stuff that you need if you're dying is community around you, you know, people to make life easier for you, people to bring you meals and be there for people's families. And that was denied people in Emmanuel. Next time...
T.B. Joshua always feared that someone would reveal his secret. And like Jesus, he predicted that one of his disciples would betray him. And that person would be one of his closest confidants. A disciple whose betrayal would not go unpunished.
This is a woman who tried using different means to spread a web of lies and deceit. Beware, beware, beware, beware of blasphemers. We approached the Synagogue Church of All Nations with the allegations made in this series. They did not offer a response or address any of the claims directly, but in an earlier email told us that making unfounded allegations against Prophet TB Joshua is not a new occurrence.
None of the allegations was ever substantiated. Thanks for listening to World of Secrets, Season 2, The Disciples, from the BBC World Service. This is Episode 6 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 Katt. 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.
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.
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