2024-01-10 12:57:33
Article information
- Author, Charlie Northcott, Helen Spooner & Tamasin Ford
- Role, BBC Africa Eye
- January 10, 2024, 12:53 GMT
Updated 4 hours ago
BBC reveals how late megachurch leader TB Joshua, accused of committing widespread sex crimes, locked up his own daughter and tortured her for years before leaving her homeless in the streets of Lagos, Nigeria.
Warning: Contains details that some readers may find distressing
“My father was afraid, constant fear. He was very afraid that someone would speak,” says Ajoke, one of the pastor’s daughters, the first to denounce to the BBC the abuse she witnessed in the his father’s church, the Synagogue Church of All Nations (Scoan).
TB Joshua, who died in 2021 at the age of 57, is accused of committing widespread abuse and torture for almost 20 years.
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Now 27, Ajoke is living in hiding and has abandoned her last name “Joshua” – the BBC is not publishing her new name.
Little is known about Ajoke’s biological mother, who is said to be one of TB Joshua’s devotees. Ajoke says she was raised by Evelyn, Joshua’s widow, for as long as she can remember.
Until the age of seven, Ajoke says he had a very happy childhood, going on vacations with the Joshua family to places like Dubai.
But one day everything changed. She was expelled from school for a minor offense and a local reporter wrote an article portraying her as TB Joshua’s illegitimate child. She was removed from school and taken to Scoan Complex in Lagos.
“I was moved to the disciples’ room. I didn’t volunteer to become a disciple. I was forced to become one,” she said.
The disciples were an elite group of devoted followers who served TB Joshua and lived with him inside the labyrinthine structure of the church. They came from all over the world and many of them stayed on the church grounds for decades.
They were subject to a strict set of rules: no sleeping for more than a few hours at a time, no use of their own phones or access to personal emails, and a requirement to call TB Joshua “daddy.”
“The disciples were brainwashed and encouraged. Everyone was acting on orders, like zombies. No one questioned anything,” she explains.
As a child, Ajoke did not follow the rules like the other disciples: she refused to get up when the pastor entered the room and rebelled against harsh orders to go to bed.
It didn’t take long for the mistreatment to begin.
Shortly after her arrival, at the age of seven, she remembers being beaten for wetting the bed and then being forced to walk around the church grounds with a sign around her neck stating “I’m a bedwetter”.
“The message about Ajoke was that she had terrible evil spirits that needed to be chased away,” says a former disciple.
“At one time, during the meetings of the disciples, he [Joshua] said people could beat her. Anyone in the women’s dormitory could hit her and I remember seeing people slap her when they walked past her,” she said.
As soon as Ajoke joined the church in the Ikotun area of Lagos, she was treated like an outcast.
“She was kind of seen as the black sheep of the family,” says Rae, a native of the United Kingdom who spent 12 years in the church as a disciple. Like most of the former disciples interviewed by the BBC, she chose to use only her first name.
Rae remembers a time when Ajoke overslept and Joshua yelled at her to get up.
Image caption,
Ajoke says after years of abuse, she lost her fear of her father when she was 17.
Another follower took her into the shower and “whipped her with an electric cord, then turned on the hot water,” she said.
Recalling the incident, Ajoke said: “I was screaming at the top of my lungs and they let the water run over my head for a very long time.”
This mistreatment never stopped, she said.
“We’re talking about years and years of abuse. Constant abuse. My existence as another mother’s child undermined everything he [TB Joshua] claimed to represent.”
The abuse took on a new dimension when, at the age of 17, she confronted her father with “first-hand accounts of people who had suffered sexual abuse”.
“I saw female disciples come up to his room. They would be gone for hours. I would hear things: ‘Oh, this happened to me, he tried to sleep with me’. He tried to sleep with me. with me.’ Too many people were saying the same thing,” she says.
The BBC spoke to more than 25 former disciples – from the UK, Nigeria, USA, South Africa, Ghana, Namibia and Germany – who gave consistent accounts of the sexual abuse they suffered or witnessed.
“I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked straight into his office that day. I screamed at the top of my lungs, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you hurting all these women?
“I had lost all fear of this man. He tried to stare at me, but I looked him in the eyes,” she said.
Emmanuel, who was a part of the church for 21 years and lived in the compound as a disciple for over ten years, remembers that day clearly.
“Il [TB Joshua] was the first person to start hitting her… then other people joined in,” he said.
He said: “Can you imagine what she said about me? Even though they were hitting her, beating her, she kept saying the same thing.”
Ajoke says she was dragged out of her office and placed in a room away from other church members, where she experienced social seclusion for more than a year.
This is a form of punishment within Scoan known as “adaba”, which Rae also experienced for two years.
During this time, Ajoke says she was repeatedly hit with belts and chains, often every day.
“I wonder how I was able to survive during that time. I couldn’t even get up for days after being beaten. I couldn’t even take a shower. He did everything he could to make sure people wouldn’t hurt me. don’t listen.”
One day, when Ajoke was 19, she says she was escorted to the church doors and left there. Church security members, who were armed, were told she would never be allowed to return. This was six years before his father died.
“I found myself homeless. I had no one to turn to. No one would believe me. Nothing had prepared me for this life,” she says.
As a young woman with no money, Ajoke did what she could to survive and spent many years on the streets.
She first contacted the BBC in 2019 after watching a BBC Africa Eye report – and so began a long BBC investigation to uncover the abuse at Scoan.
The BBC contacted Scoan with the allegations from this investigation. Scoan did not respond to it, but denied the previous allegations against TB Joshua.
“Making unfounded allegations against the Prophet TB Joshua is not new… None of these allegations have ever been substantiated,” Scoan told the BBC.
With the help of former disciples and a few close friends, Ajoke recently managed to get off the streets. But this led to episodes where she struggled with her mental health.
Despite everything she went through, she remained determined to tell the truth about her father.
“Every time I was beaten, every time I was humiliated, it reminded me that there was something wrong with the system,” she says.
Former followers told the BBC that seeing Ajoke stand up to the man was one of the main reasons they began to doubt their faith in TB Joshua.
“He kept us all in slavery, total and absolute slavery,” Emmanuel explains.
“Ajoke had the audacity to confront her. I consider her a hero.
The truth, Ajoke says, is the most important thing to her: “I lost everything, my home, my family, but for me it all comes down to the truth.
“And as long as there is breath in me, I will defend her to the end.
She dreams of one day returning to school and finishing her education that was cut short so quickly.
This Africa Eye investigation was conducted by Charlie Northcott, Helen Spooner, Maggie Andresen, Yemisi Adegoke and Ines Ward.
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