Multichoice yanks off TB Joshua’s Emmanuel TV from DStv based on BBC expose
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Multichoice has announced it would yank off TB Joshua’s Emmanuel TV from Dstv and GOtv on January 17 over the expose by the BBC he sexually and physically abused members of his Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), one of them his daughter.
“Dear viewer, please note that Emmanuel TV will exit on the 17th of January 2024. Thank you for watching,” Multichoice said in a notice to subscribers without explaining why.
The decision came hot on the heels of testimonies by about 30 former and current SCOAN members in a BBC investigation alleging Joshua sexually abused or physically attacked them before his death in June 2021.
It has also been reported Emmanuel TV will discontinue on StarSat and various other pay-TV platforms.
The BBC said the three-part documentary on the scandal was investigated on three continents – Africa, Europe, America – over a period of three years which began before Joshua died in 2021.
Reports show media probe of the abuses of Joshua dates back to 1996 when investigative journalist Kola Olawuyi (now late) presented his findings on radio, but the authorities did not bother to investigate or prosecute Joshua.
Both the federal and Lagos State government also let him off the hook in 2014 when the SCOAN building in Lagos collapsed due to week structures, killing several foreigners, many of them South Africans.
Joshua’s sexual and physical abuses went on for decades and the confirmation by his daughter, Ajoke, in the BBC report underscores the ignorance or deliberate denial of those who cast doubt on the atrocities, including Femi Fani-Kayode, who have attacked the broadcaster for exposing the evil.
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The BBC report, excerpted from its omnibus investigation, is produced below:
Ajoke, TB Joshua’s daughter, recounts torture after standing up to ‘Daddy’
The BBC reveals how the late megachurch leader TB Joshua, who is accused of committing sexual crimes on a mass scale, locked up his own daughter and tortured her for years before leaving her homeless on the streets of Lagos, Nigeria.
Warning: Contains details some readers may find distressing
“My dad had fear, constant fear. He was very afraid that someone would speak up,” says one of the pastor’s daughters, Ajoke – one of the first whistle-blowers to reach out to the BBC about the abuse she witnessed at her father’s church, the Synagogue Church of All Nations (Scoan).
TB Joshua, who died in 2021 at the age of 57, is accused of widespread abuse and torture spanning almost 20 years.
Now aged 27, Ajoke lives in hiding and has dropped her surname “Joshua” – the BBC is not publishing her new name.
Little is known about Ajoke’s birth mother, who was believed to be one of TB Joshua’s congregants. Ajoke says she was raised by Evelyn, Joshua’s widow, from as early as she can remember.
Until the age of seven, Ajoke says she had a very happy childhood, going on holiday with the Joshua family to places like Dubai.
But one day everything changed. She was suspended from school for a misdemeanour, and a local journalist wrote an article referring to her as the illegitimate child of TB Joshua. She was pulled out of school and taken to the Scoan compound in Lagos.
“I was made to move to the disciples’ room. I didn’t volunteer to be a disciple. I was made to join,” she says.
The disciples were an elite group of dedicated followers who served TB Joshua and lived with him inside the maze-like structure of the church. They came from all over the world, many staying at the compound for decades.
They lived under a strict set of rules: forbidden to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, prohibited from using their own phones or having access to their personal emails, and forced to call TB Joshua “Daddy”.
“The disciples were both brainwashed and enablers. Everybody was just acting based on command – like zombies. Nobody was questioning anything,” she says.
Just a child, Ajoke would not follow the rules like the other disciples: she refused to stand up when the pastor came into the room and rebelled against the severe sleeping orders.
The abuse started soon after.
Not long after arriving, aged seven, she remembers being beaten for wetting the bed and then being forced to walk around the compound with a sign around her neck saying “I am a bedwetter.”
“The message about Ajoke was that she had terrible evil spirits that needed to be driven out,” says one former female disciple.
“There was a time in the disciple meetings – he [Joshua] said people could beat her. Anyone in the female dormitory could just hit her and I remember just seeing people slapping her as they walked past,” she says.
From the moment Ajoke moved to the church in the Ikotun neighbourhood of Lagos, she was treated like an outcast.
“She was, like, kind of labelled the black sheep of the family,” says Rae, from the UK, who spent 12 years living in the church as a disciple. Like most of the former disciples interviewed by the BBC, she opted to only use her first name.
Rae remembers a time when Ajoke slept for too long, and Joshua shouted at her to get up.
Ajoke says after years of abuse she lost her fear of her father aged 17.
Another disciple took her to the shower and “whipped her with an electrical cord and then turned the hot water on”, she says.
Ajoke says: “I was screaming at the top of my voice, and they just let the water run on my head for a very long time.”
Such abuse was never-ending, she says.
“We’re talking about years and years of abuse. Consistent abuse. My existence as a child from another mother undermined everything he [TB Joshua] claimed to stand for.”
The abuse escalated to a different scale when she was aged 17 and confronted her dad about “accounts, first hand, of people who had experienced sexual abuse”.
“I saw female disciples go up to his room. They were going away for hours. I was hearing things: ‘Oh this happened to me. He tried sleeping 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, US, South Africa, Ghana, Namibia and Germany – who gave powerful corroborating testimony of experiencing or witnessing sexual abuse.
“I couldn’t take it any more. I walked directly into his office on that very day. I shouted at the top of my voice: ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you hurting all these women?’
“I had lost every iota of fear for this man. He tried to stare me down, but I was looking in his eyes,” she says.
Emmanuel, who was part of the church for 21 years and spent more than a decade living in the compound as a disciple, remembers that day clearly.
“He [TB Joshua] was the first person that started hitting her… then other people joined,” he says.
“He was saying: ‘Can you imagine what she’s saying about me?’ Even as much as they were hitting her, beating her, she was still saying the same thing.”