By Suyi Ayodele

A few years ago, the self-acclaimed ‘Living Perfect Master’, Sat Guru Maharaj Ji visited the Omo N’Oba N’Edo Uku Akpolokpolo, Oba of Benin, Oba Erediauwa, of blessed memory. The visitor arrived late. God bless Oba Erediauwa. He did not cancel the visit. After all, the palace goes nowhere, the people say. The monarch waited till Guru Maharaj Ji arrived. Palace functionaries went to inform the Omo N’Oba that his guest had arrived. A diplomat to the core, Oba Erediauwa came out of the inner recess to receive the visitor from Ibadan.

After the traditional formalities, Guru Maharaj Ji was asked to speak. He apologised to Uku Akpolokpolo for coming late. Then he gave the excuse for the delay. The vehicle conveying him from Ibadan to Benin had broken down on the way, and it took quite a time before it was fixed. The Omo N’Oba listened to him with rapt attention. He betrayed no emotion. That is what makes him the Uku Akpolokpolo! Done, the microphone was taken to the Oba. He welcomed his guest with his signature tripod “thank you, thank you; thank you.” The Benin monarch said some other wonderful things about Guru Maharaj Ji. Finally, the Omo N’Oba showed why he is hailed as the Ogidigan. He asked:

“By the way, did I hear you say that your vehicle broke down on the way to Benin?” The Living Perfect Master affirmed that.  The Oba said: “Well, that’s strange. I don’t know that the Living Perfect Master also suffers the same fate as those of us mere mortals. I don’t know that the vehicle of the Living Perfect Master can also break down.” The entire Benin in the palace chorused “Oba Agha to pere e, Ise”. End of story. The Omo N’Oba rose and retired to his inner recess amidst laughter from the crowd. Sat Guru Maharaj Ji and his entourage also left. How and in what form? Like my late boss, Ayo Asagba, would say: “I don’t talk to the press!” The message was delivered in the most royal way. There is no Living Perfect Master anywhere. May Omo N’Oba N’Edo Uku Akpolokpolo Oba Erediauwa continue to occupy his prime position among his ancestors and gods. Ise!

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Fake prophets do exist. Fake miracle workers abound. Many call themselves God here on earth. We have had Jesus of Oyingbo before. At a time, one Reverend King was the miracle worker of Lagos. In the Western World, there was once a Reverend Jim Jones, who claimed to have a God-given healing power and convinced hundreds of his devotees to commit mass suicide before he killed himself on November 18, 1978 in jungles of Guyana, South America. The wisdom of the Omo N’Oba in his encounter with Sat Guru Maharaj Ji was that no man should judge another man. The Benin monarch never called the ‘Living Perfect Master fake. The Oba merely expressed surprise that someone who is ‘God’ himself could also suffer the same human misfortune like the case of a broken-down vehicle. The deductions were left for the audience to make. That is African wisdom in its undiluted form. It requires no ‘investigative journalism’ of the so-called ‘civilised’ world to point that out!

Africans lived a normal lifestyle before the Europeans came with their ‘civilisation’. Africans had no banks before the Western world introduced banking systems. There were no certified accountants in a typical African setting before the coming of the whites. Yet, in those African societies, ‘accounts’ were always balanced and there were no negative ledgers. The White man came and told our forebears to throw away everything that made their lives easy and pleasant. The Whites called the beautiful sculptures and artefacts made by those African legends of old, “graven images”. They told our fathers not to pour libations to the gods and ancestors. Our forebears listened to the White man. But at any opportunity the White man had, he stole the objects he tagged earthen, took them to his museums in Europe and asked the children of the original owners to come and pay to see the creative works of their fathers! What a civilisation!. As recent as year 2022, the entire Benin Kingdom was still asking the United Kingdom and other European countries to return the artworks the British imperialist soldiers stole when they invaded the ancient Benin Kingdom in 1897, in what is known in World History as the Benin Massacre. E. Ola Abiola, one of the greatest historians of this generation, introduced the 1897 Benin Massacre as “one of the unpardonable atrocities perpetrated by the agents of the Royal Niger Company in their bid to secure for Britain the dominion over the Niger Delta” (See A Textbook of West African History: A.D 100 to Present Day, 1974). What type of civilisation encourages stealing, slave trade and complete annihilation of a people who resisted being ruled by strangers. For over a hundred years, the British people and other nefarious Europeans subjugated Africa and Africans to untold hardship. They did this through the instrumentality of religion, Christianity. Whatever education the Whites ‘gave’ the Black Race during the colonial era was not meant to liberate the race or to give them equal rights and opportunities. The Blacks were educated to work in the colonial offices; nothing more.

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Thankfully, the few educated Africans began the agitation for the end of colonialism. Those early nationalists saw through the hypocrisy of the Western education and the new religion, Christianity. They therefore rose, using the weapon of education, to demand for self-rule for the subjugated Africans. For instance, David Diop, the Senegalese poet (1927-1960), in his poem, The Vultures, described Christianity as a form of “civilisation” that “kicked us in the face”. The practice of baptism, he says, is “holy water”, which “slapped our cringing brows”. The Whites, he rightly describes, as “The vultures” that “built in the shadow of their talons/The bloodstained monument of tutelage”. He goes further to express the hypocrisy of the early missionaries, who sang, and “drowned the howling on the plantations”, and who also engaged in “extorted kisses”, leaving the new ‘converts’ with “bitter memories of promises broken at the point of gun”. He describes the White missionaries cum colonial masters as “foreigners who did not seem human/Who knew all the books did not know love”. David Diop’s imagery of the vulture speaks volume of the atrocities of that era, when the Whites who claimed to be on liberation mission to the dark world, did the most appalling! Diop ends the poem on a positive note by expressing the confidence that “In spite of the desolate villages of torn Africa/ Hope was preserved in us as in a fortress.” Since Africans gained independence from the Europeans, the Western World has not been the same. And all they do is try to bring down Africa at all cost. Everything from the Back Race is never considered good in the eyes of the White man. It is like the case of the rival wife and her set of twins. Those beautiful creatures are never regarded as “two bouncing babies in the eyes of the other wife, but two tiny things.” Unfortunate for Africans, our leaders have not helped matters. They have, through their perfidy, sold us to second slavery. The only difference is that we have no padlocks yet on our lips.

It is this idea of bringing down anything African that informed, to a larger extent, the documentary by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), on the late Nigerian tele-evangelist, Temitope Balogun Joshua, otherwise known as T. B. Joshua, the founder of the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN). T.B. Joshua passed on June 5, 2021. While alive, the preacher never enjoyed the best of public relations. Many of his ‘fellow Christians’ never loved him and they did not hide it. At his death in 2021, many preachers rose in his condemnation. He was called all sorts of names. His ministry was branded ‘satanic’. His ‘anointing’ was interrogated. Some could not stand the fact that T.B. Joshua did not have a “spiritual godfather”, who “poured the anointing on him” as if that is the ticket to heaven! I did a piece with the title: “T.B. Joshua and the gatekeepers of heaven”, published on this page on June 22, 2021. The major accusation against T.B. Joshua was that he performed some of his miracles using other forces other than the name of the Lord. For the purpose of this discourse, let us agree that it was true then that all the “miracles” the late preacher performed were procured through the devil itself. The question we should ask is, how is that the problem of any mortal? Why are we fighting a battle that belongs to God for Him? If Joshua claimed that he healed people through the name of Jesus, and it turned out to be false, are we Jesus? The Lord, in whose name the late preacher claimed to have ‘healed’, and ‘delivered’ people is not dead. Can’t we wait for the expected day of judgement to see if the miracles of  T.B. Joshua were of the Lord or not?

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The most cowardly of all the attacks on the person of T.B. Joshua, came last week from the BBC, which claimed among other things that the miracles were fake, and that he tortured and raped women. The British broadcasting station equally alleged that T.B. Joshua was a serial abortionist. Why on earth did it take the BBC over two years to come up with these allegations? Why were these grievous allegations levelled against a dead man who is no longer in any position to defend himself? Who does that but a coward? I don’t want to hold any brief for Joshua on his miracles. I was never a participant in his miracle sessions. But like I pointed out in the piece referenced above, I saw one of those miracles with my korokoro eyes. And I say this, even if the devil itself was the one that gave the healing potion to T. B. Joshua in that instance, I think, without prejudice to what my Sunday School teacher will say, that the devil deserves accolades for that singular act!

T. B. Joshua could be fake and devilish. That is not my business. I am just like that blind man who was healed by Jesus and he declared, when he was asked if he knew that Jesus was a sinner thus: “Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not; one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.” Why do I push this position? My Lord Jesus Christ Himself was not spared of the allegation of procuring miracles by other means. And when He was confronted, this was how Jesus responded as recorded in Luke 11:18-19: “If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say that I cast out devils through Beelzebub. Now, if I drive out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your followers drive them out? So then, they will be your judge.”  I think this is apt for the BBC and its hate-filled documentary. If T.B. Joshua’s miracles were fake, let the BBC go and perform genuine miracles!  As for the ‘victims of serial rape, abortion and tortures’, they have my ‘sympathy’. I wish they could go and press charges. If there is any one of them in Nigeria, I volunteer to foot the litigation bills provided they have not washed off the evidence! What a way to accuse a man! I sincerely hope Mrs. Evelyn Joshua, the widow of T. B. Joshua, is not in any way moved by these ‘new’ allegations. Madam Joshua, if I may counsel, should be consoled by the admonition by Gamaliel in Acts 5: 38-39: “…for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought; But if if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.”  The BBC can hold on to its documentary, I preach no more on this matter! Let the dead rest!