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TB Joshua: BBC Report Lists Six Mind-blowing Ways Late Church Leader Faked Miracles

Published

2 years ago

January 14, 2024

A BBC Africa Eye report has insisted that the late Nigerian televangelist, TB Joshua faked miracles within his Synagogue Church of All Nations.

BBC in the report stated that it had uncovered a web of deceptive practices allegedly employed by the late Nigerian televangelist to fabricate miracles and listed six ways the late church leader allegedly faked miracles

It noted that the investigation, which draws insights from more than 25 insiders across various countries, sheds light on a series of deceptive tactics employed within SCOAN.

The investigation, which was published on BBC Eye Website on Sunday, alleged that Joshua, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 57, was a fraud.

It details six ways through which TB Joshua allegedly deceived worshippers, noting that these discoveries came from those who worked with the late church leader.

In 2004, Nigeria’s broadcast regulator prohibited the airing of pastors’ supposed miracles on live terrestrial TV, leading Joshua to launch Emmanuel TV on satellite and later online.

His global television and social media network became one of the world’s most successful Christian platforms, broadcasting to millions across Europe, the Americas, South East Asia, and Africa. His YouTube channel garnered hundreds of millions of views.

Below are the six ways listed by the BBC Africa Eye in its report:

“1: The emergency department: An exclusive section of the church, named the “emergency department”, was responsible for making the so-called miracles look real.

“This is where the sick, who came to be healed, would be screened, and where the team would decide who should be filmed and prayed for by Joshua.

“Agomoh Paul, who supervised the department for 10 years – receiving direct instructions from Joshua, told the BBC that the team was “trained by medical doctors”.

“He is a former disciple – one of an elite group of dedicated followers who lived with the pastor inside the Scoan compound.

“Any cancerous situation, they send them away. Then, people who had normal open wounds that can heal, they bring them in, to present as cancer,” he says.

“Only a select group of trusted disciples were allowed to work in the emergency department. They would write placards for each follower to hold, detailing their made-up or exaggerated ailments. When it was time to meet Joshua, they would stand in line in front of the cameras and be “healed”.

“It was a complicated system. Not all disciples knew what was happening. It was a secret,” Mr Paul says.

“2: Drugs: Every foreign visitor who came to the church to be healed had to fill out a medical report, detailing their illness and the medication they were currently prescribed.

“They would be told to stop taking them, but Joshua would order pharmacists to procure the same medicine.

“Without their knowledge, they would “put those drugs in their fruit drinks,” explains Mr Paul, who said people would be urged to drink the cocktail that had been blessed by Joshua.

“This meant while visitors were residing at SCOAN, they would not become unwell and would believe in the divine healing powers of their pastor.

“In the 1990s when HIV/AIDs had reached epidemic levels across parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Joshua told visitors to stop taking their antiretroviral medication when they returned home.

“I know people died because they didn’t take their medicine, and it’s difficult to live with that,” admits a former disciple, who asked not to be named.

“Tash Ford, now 49, who went to Lagos from the South African city of Johannesburg in 2001 in the hope of having her failing kidney healed, was told to stop taking her drugs.

“It was the promise that… you could supernaturally receive a new kidney,” she told the BBC.

“At the time she had already had two kidney transplants. Ms Ford says the disciples said: “Stop taking your medication and just believe.”

‘She did believe she had been healed. But when she got home, after four weeks of not taking her medicine, she went into renal failure and was admitted to hospital.

“The medics initially managed to save her kidney but eventually it stopped working and she had to have kidney dialysis for more than six years before having a third transplant in 2011.”

“3: Brainwashing: Ms Ford says when she was at Scoan she never had any doubts: “I honestly thought we were seeing miracles. I literally couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I saw someone walk out of a wheelchair.”

“The theatricality seemed to draw everyone in.

“The former disciple told the BBC that after being screened, the chosen followers would be told to “exaggerate their problems so that God can heal you and exaggerate your healing”.

“The people, themselves, are clearly being manipulated,” she says.

“The church had a ready supply of wheelchairs which followers were coaxed to use. They were warned they would not be healed unless they sat in one when they met Joshua.

“We are telling them: ‘If you come out there, and walk with your legs, Papa will not pray for you. You need to shout: “Man of God, help me, I cannot walk,” says Mr Paul.

“Another former disciple, Bisola, who spent 14 years living at Scoan, accompanied Joshua on his National Healing Campaign at the Church of Our Saviour in Singapore in 2006.

“She says she saw people in wheelchairs try to stand up after the pastor told the congregation “he had released faith into the stadium”.

“However, these people had not been screened and she saw them fall down. “I was crying. I was crying for them,” she says.

“The emergency department workers themselves were also being manipulated. They were subjected to horrifying ordeals, including rape, physical violence, and torture, and lived by a strict set of rules – forbidden to sleep for more than a few hours at a time.

“Now they struggle to understand how and why they continued to follow the pastor’s orders.

“TB Joshua told me: ‘Don’t worry, we use this thing to build people’s faith in Christ.’ I wasn’t having in mind that I was actually doing something wrong. I thought I was doing something that would help to build the faith of people in the church,” says Mr Paul.

“For Ms Ford, it has meant she has lost all faith in organised religion: “I wish we had known that it was all a farce, that it wasn’t true. I was manipulated into believing that what the prophet was doing was supernatural, miracles, wonders, signs.”

“4: Bribes: Some disciples allege they were charged with finding people who needed money to pretend to be sick.

“When they performed healing crusades in countries outside Nigeria, they would go to the poorer areas of a city to search for people living in poverty.

“We would say: ‘We need you to just act out this particular scene and we will pay you,’” another former disciple told the BBC.

“We get them into hotels, we get them cleaned up. They come, they do what they do. We give them their money and the rest is history,” she says.

“Before the service, they would tell Joshua which rows they had planted these people, and what clothes they were wearing, so he would know who to perform his supposed miracles on.

“People would be brought in just to pretend that they were healed,” she says.

‘5: Fake medical certificates: The “healing miracles” broadcast to millions regularly included medical reports stating people had been cured of HIV/Aids and diseases like cancer.

“Doctors were interviewed on camera confirming the cures.

“In 2000 Nigerian journalist Adejuwon Soyinka reported that these medical certificates were fake, but Joshua quashed his investigation and it went nowhere.

“To this day some people believe they were healed, but insiders say it was all a performance on the late preacher’s part.

“The whole thing is stage-managed and faked. It’s faked,” says Mr Paul, describing Joshua as an “evil genius”.

“There was nothing that took place in the compound that Joshua did not know about”, he explains.

“TB Joshua was the one who masterminded the whole manipulation,” he says.

“6: Video manipulation: The “miracles” were filmed and then edited to make it look like the supposed healing had happened instantaneously. Before and after footage was spliced together to show his purported miraculous powers, but in reality the films were shot months, or even a year, apart.

“All you see on TV is the before and after, you don’t know the time-space,” says Bisola, who was Scoan’s chief video editor for five years and worked on Emmanuel TV. Like other insiders interviewed by the BBC, she opted to only use her first name.

“What people see… is not real. It is a fraud,” she says about the clips and broadcasts she oversaw.

“I am speaking now as someone who was an insider,” she says.

“Anything they did not want viewers to see was “cut away”. It was all “organised”, she says.

BBC Africa reached out to SCOAN with the allegations but received no response, although the church denied previous claims against Joshua, stating, “Making unfounded allegations against Prophet TB Joshua is not a new occurrence… None of the allegations was ever substantiated.”
PUNCH

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US Lawmakers Demand Answers From Trump Administration Over Chinese Chemical Shipments To Iran

Published

1 day ago

November 15, 2025

Editor

US lawmakers have called for the Trump administration to respond to reporting that Chinese firms are helping Iran rebuild its ballistic missile program in defiance of United Nations sanctions.

The call, from Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi and Joe Courtney, follows CNN reporting last month detailing what Western intelligence sources said were several shipments of sodium perchlorate, a missile propellant precursor, from China to Iran since the end of September.

These shipments are “indispensable to Tehran’s efforts to rebuild its ballistic missile arsenal following its 12-day war with Israel last summer,” the congressmen wrote in a letter to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe.

“Beijing’s support for Tehran’s rearmament is deeply concerning and provides yet another example of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) willingness to abet authoritarian aggression from Europe to the Middle East,” they said.

According to CNN’s reporting, European intelligence sources say 2,000 tons of sodium perchlorate, the main precursor in the production of the solid propellant that powers Iran’s mid-range conventional missiles, have arrived from China to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas between late September and mid-October. The chemicals were bought by Iran from Chinese suppliers, the sources say.

The deliveries, which analysts say could provide enough chemical for roughly 500 ballistic missiles, appear to show Iran is stepping up the rebuilding of its missile program, which was depleted by the conflict with Israel in June.

They also come as there has been increased concern in Washington about potential emerging coordination between China, Iran, Russia and North Korea. US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met last month for talks that resulted in an economic truce de-escalating their trade war.

“Beijing’s latest shipments of these critical chemical precursors indicate that US actions to date have failed to deter it from supporting Tehran’s procurement of offensive military capabilities,” Krishnamoorthi, who is the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the CCP, and Courtney, ranking member of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, wrote in their letter.

Beijing’s support “not only increases Iran’s threat to its neighbors but also assists Russia and pro-Iranian proxy groups like the Houthis whose missile programs Iran has previously supported,” the Congressmen said.

The shipments also “contravene sanctions the United Nations reinstated in September that prohibit international support for Iran’s ballistic missile program and development of nuclear weapons delivery systems,” they added.

Krishnamoorthi and Courtney called for the Trump administration to explain what actions it was taking to “respond to the PRC’s (People’s Republic of China) continuing support to Iran’s ballistic missile program,” including in coordination with US allies and partners.

The Trump administration in April announced sanctions on a dozen entities and individuals based in Iran and China for their role procuring ballistic missile propellant ingredients on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Last month, more-than-a-decade-old UN sanctions on Tehran were restored by a so-called snapback mechanism – a provision for Iranian breaches of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) deal to monitor its nuclear program.

Under the sanctions re-imposed last month, Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. UN member states must also prevent the provision to Iran of materials that could contribute to the country’s development of a nuclear weapons delivery system, which experts say could include ballistic missiles.

States are also required to prevent the provision to Iran of assistance in the manufacture of arms.

While the shipped substance – sodium perchlorate – is not specifically named in UN documents on materials banned for export to Iran, it is a direct precursor of ammonium perchlorate, a listed and prohibited oxidizer used in ballistic missiles.

China and Iran
Experts say that the sanctions’ failure to explicitly prohibit the chemical may leave China room to argue that it is not in violation of any UN ban. China, along with Russia, opposed the reimposition of the UN sanctions, saying it undermines efforts for a “diplomatic settlement of the Iranian nuclear issue,” and may not see it bound by those rules, as such.

In response to a question from CNN last month about the recent shipments, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that while he “not familiar with the specific situation,” China has “consistently implemented export controls on dual-use items in accordance with its international obligations and domestic laws and regulations.”

“We want to emphasize that China is committed to peacefully resolving the Iranian nuclear issue through political and diplomatic means and opposes sanctions and pressure,” the spokesperson said.

CNN reporting last month followed the journeys of several cargo ships identified by intelligence sources as being involved in the latest deliveries of sodium perchlorate from Chinese ports to Iran, using ship tracking data and the social media of their crew.

Several of the cargo ships and Chinese entities involved are under sanctions from the United States.

Some of those vessels appear to have gone back and forth several times between China and Iran since the end of April. The sources say their crew seem to be employed by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines and their regular social media posts provide a trail of their stops on the China to Iran journey.

Similar shipments had previously been reported, and entities in China, long a diplomatic and economic ally of Iran, are also known to use a network of vessels to filter US-sanctioned Iranian oil to the country.

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South Africa To Investigate ‘Mystery’ Of Planeload Of Palestinians

Published

1 day ago

November 15, 2025

Editor

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa says there will be an investigation into the “mysterious” arrival of a chartered plane carrying 153 Palestinians from Gaza into the country.

The group arrived at OR Tambo International Airport but were initially refused entry and were stuck in the plane for more than 10 hours as they “did not have the customary departure stamps in their passports”, local authorities said.

Most were eventually allowed in after intervention from a local charity and because of the government’s “empathy [and] compassion”, Ramaphosa said.

The circumstances of their departure from Gaza and travel to South Africa remain unclear.

South Africa has maintained strong support for the Palestinian cause throughout the war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza.

Ramaphosa said the group “somehow mysteriously were put on a plane that passed by Nairobi” and flew to South Africa, reports the News24 site.

Israeli military body Cogat, which controls Gaza’s crossings, said in a statement: “The residents left the Gaza Strip after Cogat received approval from a third country to receive them.” It did not specify the country.

According to the Palestinian embassy in South Africa, the group left Israel’s Ramon Airport and flew to the country via the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, “without any prior note or coordination”.

A statement from the embassy said “an unregistered and misleading organization [had] exploited the tragic humanitarian conditions of our people in Gaza, deceived families, collected money from them, and facilitated their travel in an irregular and irresponsible manner”.

The BBC has asked the Kenyan government for comment.

Of the 153, 23 managed to fly on to other destinations, leaving 130 who were admitted into the country, South African authorities say.

Ramaphosa, speaking during an event in Johannesburg, said he was informed of the unfolding crisis by the home affairs minister.

In response, the president said “we cannot turn them back”, according to News24.

“Even though they do not have the necessary documents and papers, these are people from a strife-torn, a war-torn country.”

The president also told reporters the South African government would carry out a “proper evaluation” of the matter and update the public on “what is happening and how this matter came to be where it is”, according to public broadcaster SABC.

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber said that while Palestinian passport-holders qualified for 90-day visa-exempt access to South Africa, the lack of departure stamps, return tickets or accommodation addresses in some of the travellers’ documentation resulted in the initial refusal to let them into the country.

Once it was established that the absence of this information “did not indicate that the travellers wished to apply for asylum” and their accommodation was confirmed, they were granted entry.

“All of the travellers are in possession of valid passports and, at present, none of them have applied for asylum,” he said.

South African charity Gift of the Givers has said it will provide the group with accommodation in the country.

Civil societies in South Africa have called for investigations into the conditions the Palestinians had fled in Gaza and the exact route of the aircraft.

One of the Palestinians who spoke to local eNCA TV expressed his relief to be in South Africa, describing it as a country of “peace, laws and justice”.

“We came from Gaza where we’ve faced death on daily basis. We have survived a war of two years and we are lucky to be here,” said one man who had fled with his wife and two children.

Gift of the Givers has since called for Ramaphosa to investigate the home affairs ministry and border authority for the “humiliation they’ve caused” the Palestinians.

The organisation’s founder Dr Imtiaz Sooliman said this treatment included being forced to wait for hours on the tarmac at the airport, being denied food provided by the group and “using every excuse in the book to prevent these passengers from disembarking”.

South Africa has been highly critical of Israel’s military operation in Gaza.

The country’s sympathy for the Palestinian fight for an independent state goes back decades, particularly the early 1990s when anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela pledged support for the Palestinian cause.

Large pro-Palestinian marches have been held around South Africa since the conflict began.

Smaller pro-Israel marches and rallies have been held in the country, which hosts the largest Jewish community in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2023, the South African government filed a case against Israel with the International Court of Justice, accusing it of genocide in Gaza. Israel has strongly rejected the South African claim, calling it “baseless”.

Headline

Trump Orders Tougher Visa Screening Regime

Published

6 days ago

November 10, 2025

Editor

The Donald Trump administration has reinstated a sweeping global visa policy that can make it harder for many foreign nationals—including Nigerians—to obtain U.S. visas, as Washington revives its controversial “public charge” rule targeting those deemed likely to depend on public benefits.

A newly issued State Department cable, obtained by Fox News Digital, directed American embassies and consulates worldwide to enforce the policy immediately. The directive, which officials say restores a Trump-era standard relaxed under President Joe Biden, instructs U.S. consular officers to deny visas to anyone considered likely to rely on government assistance in the United States of America.

Under the rule, visa applicants will be assessed on a wide range of personal factors—including their health, age, English proficiency, financial stability, and potential need for long-term medical care.

Consular officers are urged to take a holistic approach, considering everything from the applicant’s visa petition and financial affidavit to their medical report and any other information uncovered during background checks.

“You must examine all aspects of the case,” the guidance reads, “including the petition, visa application, medical report, affidavit of support, and any information uncovered in the course of screening and vetting.”

Older applicants, particularly those nearing retirement age, are expected to face extra scrutiny. The cable notes that “long-term institutionalisation (e.g., at a nursing facility) can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and should be considered,” suggesting that age and health will play major roles in visa decisions.

The revived rule follows an executive order signed by President Donald Trump titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidisation of Open Borders”. The order, according to the State Department memo, aims to ensure “that no taxpayer-funded benefits go to unqualified aliens.”

The cable further stresses that the public charge determination rests solely on the judgment of each consular officer, who must conduct a “comprehensive and thorough vetting” before issuing any visa. “There is no ‘bright line’ test,” the cable adds. “You must consider all aspects of the case and determine whether the applicant’s circumstances… suggest that he is more likely than not to become a public charge at any time.”

A State Department official told Fox News Digital, “For years, the American taxpayer was held hostage by the Biden administration’s disastrous open borders agenda… The Trump administration has brought an end to the era of mass immigration.”

The U.S. State Department controls visa issuance at embassies abroad, while the Department of Homeland Security manages who is ultimately admitted into the country or allowed to adjust status once inside the U.S. Though both agencies operate under the same immigration laws, the new guidance grants wide latitude to consular officers overseas to reject applicants on “public charge” grounds.

Before now, the Biden administration’s 2022 version of the rule had limited the benefits considered under the policy — counting only direct cash assistance and long-term institutional care, while excluding popular social support programmes such as food stamps (SNAP), Medicaid, housing vouchers, and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programme.

The Trump administration had expanded that definition in 2019 to include a broader range of public benefits, though several U.S. courts later blocked parts of the policy before it was scrapped by President Biden in 2021.

This week’s cable now marks a full return to that broader interpretation, instructing American consular officials to “conduct a comprehensive and thorough vetting” and to verify all supporting financial documents presented by applicants.

For many Nigerians seeking U.S. visas — from students and workers to elderly immigrants joining family abroad — the revived rule could mean more rejections and lengthier processing times.