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| TB Joshua |
I may be wrong, but it’s my firm belief that I have spent more time with Prophet T.B. Joshua in recent years than any other journalist on earth, and that’s why I can speak about his alleged bribe-giving with final authority.
I had not always written positive stories about T.B. Joshua, most of my stories were extremely negative, and one story even made Nigeria’s State Security Service to invite him for questioning.
One story called him the son of the devil and another quoted his sworn enemy , Pastor Chris Okotie, as warning that all his church members will go to hell fire.
So hard was one of the stories that when the President of Malawi died, a story I had written two years earlier was exhumed by Joshua’s perceived critics and became the most read story in Southern African countries. It was titled “Cameroon blacklists T.B. Joshua.”. It said his miracles were fake.
Anyway, by the time I finally met T.B. Joshua, he asked me why I was “determined to destroy his church when he was doing the work of God?”. I told him I was a journalist, not his image maker. I quickly added that I was not only after negative stories and promised that the day there would be a good story in his church,I would also write. And I always did.
But even as I published those positive stories, only this year, I wrote about a woman who travelled for healing from Douala to Lagos but died days after she claimed she had been healed.
Because of my unbiased stories, I earned not love but the respect of Prophet T.B. Joshua. He told me many times, he did not trust me but respected me.
Today, I would write about the charity work he was doing, but the next day, I will write about a woman who came to church for healing but passed on.
Up till today, Prophet T.B. Joshua does not know where to place me, whether I am his friend or enemy. But I know I am a journalist who should report the truth, and be fair and objective even to the most hated people.
So what you’re about to read is nothing but the truth. I know the man, and I know journalists, the good ones and the bad ones in Nigeria, and I understand how the game is played.
The day a guesthouse collapsed in Prophet T.B. Joshua’s church last month, I met with him, several times that day, one on one. The last time I saw him on that Friday, I left him at about 1 o’clock in the morning.
The next day on Saturday, I sat down with him, again one on one, and he was heartbroken. Of all the years that I had met him in his office, he was always comfortably seated on a chair in his office. But that Saturday, as the South African Embassy began to call to determine how many of their citizens had died, T.B. Joshua sat down not on his usual chair but rather on top of the table, holding his hands, and unable to speak.
When he opened his mouth to talk to me, what he told me was humbling. I was face to face with one of Nigeria’s most powerful men at the very time of his biggest trial.
It was a private conversation that I won’t reveal here but believe me, it was humbling.
That is why I can talk authoritatively about everything behind the scene surrounding the building collapse. Only God can fault me because I was there all the time.
Before I talk about the alleged bribe, I would like to quickly clear something. Many have blamed T.B. Joshua or his church members for preventing journalists and other emergency workers from gaining access into the crash site early enough.
But here is the truth. The Lagos State Government behaved extremely immaturely in this entire saga.
Take for instance on Friday, hours after the building collapsed and while rescuers were still trying to bring out the injured and the dead, a woman from the building agency of the Lagos State Government rushed to the crash site with a letter warning that the government would like to take over the property when investigation is completed and if it is proven that it was negligence that caused the crash.
After she was almost lynched by rescuers who felt she was callous, heartless and stupid to have come to take over the property when rescue operation was still on going, she went into the office and handed the warning later over to Prophet T B. Joshua.
T.B. Joshua showed me the letter and said: “Is this how government works? We are still trying to pull people out of the rubble and all they are interested in is how to take over the building? ” I can tell you, it was heartbreaking.
That is as far as the government is concerned. They were callous and did not care about the dead. So callous were they that the Governor of Lagos only showed up at the scene of the crash 3 days after, even after learning that scores of people had died.
In fact, the governor had to succumb to pressure from foreign governments before he could make the journey on Sunday. The building had collapsed on Friday.
Many people have also said that had the church allowed the Nigerian Emergency Management Agency, NEMA, access to the site, many people would have been rescued.
But the truth is that NEMA has no equipment needed to rescue people. NEMA can only coordinate rescue operation by seeking the assistance of construction companies such as Julius Berger. But when the official of NEMA arrived at the site on that Friday, the church had already called on Julius Berger and other construction companies to help. They were already there rescuing the injured and pulling out the dead. All NEMA was doing was to release the number of the dead and the injured to the media. NEMA is a failed and incapacitated agency that cannot rescue anyone even plane crash victims, so claiming to be the Messiah is not only wrong but also extremely exaggerated.
If a plane crashes in Nigeria today, NEMA will have no helicopter to rescue anyone. If a building collapses, NEMA will have no caterpillar, no truck, no bulldozer to rescue anyone. NEMA has been dubbed an agency that “searches and recovers bodies rather than searches and rescues the injured”.
NEMA should shut the hell up and get enough funding and equipment to do their job rather than playing to the gallery and claiming that they “just coordinate “.
As far as journalists are concerned, although I know very good ones, I can say authoritatively that many who wrote the first stories were being extremely sensational and lacked facts.
Rescue operation had just started when many online sites began writing that more than 200 bodies had been recovered. Other sites talked about trucks loaded with corpses and others mentioned between 63 and 150 dead bodies already counted.
Many also wanted to go straight into the site even as rescue operation was still ongoing. Rescuers felt, they will not help their job and will not even help in rescuing anyone and will just add to the panic already online.
It is that lack of objectivity, the eageeness to worsen the bad without concrete evidence that had made many people in the Synagogue Church of All Nations suspicious of many journalists.
Truth be told. T.B. Joshua is a controversial figure in Nigeria. While millions of people like him, millions also claim that he uses the power of Satan yo cure or heal people. Such people. Including many journalists already have their biases against the church.
It was because of such conduct, of being unprofessional and of exaggerating tragedies that many people give journalists money when calamities strike them.
T.B. Joshua kept telling journalists “this is the time to stand with me in tragedy, this is a hard time for me. I need your support”. By saying so, he did not mean do not go and write your stories, he meant “put sensationalism aside, get your facts right, and write.”
If journalists were objective, when the spokesman of NEMA began to tell them why the building collapsed, even without investigation, and without adequate training, shouldn’t professional journalists ask him: “How do you know sir?”
That’s why I said the other day that journalism is in trouble. Because in Nigeria last sometimes it’s the first person to get to the newspapers who dictates public opinion. Sometimes, you end up giving journalists money not because you want them to favour you, but just to be professional and fair to call sides.
I was not there that Sunday when T.B. Joshua allegedly gave some money to 15 journalists in his church, but because I know the man and I understand the media here, it could have just been another way of saying, “stand with me, be professional, drop sensationalism, get your facts, be fair to me, be objective, use your brain before you write, dont use this tragedy to get back at me for all your biases against me and the church “.
In that case, was it a bribe? Did he want journalists to go and lie?
Here is the definition of bribery from Wikipedia.
“Bribery is an act of giving money or gift giving that alters the behavior of the recipient, where the gift is of a dishonest nature. Bribery constitutes a crime and is defined by Black’s Law Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or other person in charge of a public or legal duty.
Note that gifts of money or other items of value of an open nature to the recipient where it is otherwise available to others on an equivalent basis, and not for dishonest purposes, is not bribery. “. You can make up your mind.
That said, I will make this clear, the building collapse must be thoroughly investigated and those who are responsible for so many lives lost must pay dearly. We must drop our biases aside and focus on the facts and get to the root of the matter.
It does not matter that those who died are mainly South Africans, we must learn from our mistakes to avoid future similar tragedies.
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