Nigeria’s most prominent Christian televangelist – and one of its most controversial – physically and sexually abused at least a dozen of his top disciples who had joined his ministry in Lagos from multiple countries and continents, according to a two-year investigation by BBC Africa Eye, in partnership with openDemocracy.

This pattern of historic sexual abuse by Temitope Balogun Joshua – or TB Joshua as he is commonly known to tens of thousands of Pentecostal Christians – is among the troubling revelations into the man who founded and led the Lagos-based Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN) until his death in 2021.

Other allegations made by former senior members of the church include:

• How Joshua groomed women disciples into sexual abuse through the use of warped religious teachings, social isolation, physical violence, blackmail and sleep deprivation.
• How people who refused Joshua’s sexual advances faced solitary confinement and torture at the church compound where senior leaders lived and worked.
• How leading church figures committed fraud by faking miracles, including people paid by the church to display fake illnesses.

openDemocracy first looked into allegations of abuse by TB Joshua in 2021. A resulting story about how the pastor weaponised homophobic teachings to promote fake cures for what he called the “demon” of homosexuality resulted in YouTube shutting down his Emmanuel TV channel, which was then the main platform that the church had to reach its global audience.