TB Joshua Is Dangerous to Your Health

London — According to a damning article I read about the recent SCOAN tragedy, T B Joshua has been around since the early 90s. However, he only crossed my radar when the late President Atta Mills paid homage to his mega church after winning the presidency in 2008. The reason for the trip was that he attributed his victory at the polls to this swindler. It was a theatrical coup that was handed to him on a silver platter. He could hardly thank his star, and that was when the sluice gates burst opened for this so called man of God in Ghana. Apparently, prior to that he has been making sturdy inroads into the hearts of some of the gullible Ghanaian Christian community with his quack miracles and prophesies. On the deception of his naive itchy ear victims, which his Ghanaian counterparts are doing anyway, I kept my pen at bay so long as there was no blood on the floor. Nonetheless, when overzealous congregants at his church in Accra caused stampede that snuffed out the lives of four people, I could no longer keep my silence. Though, it was an accident I couldn’t help, but take him on due to his own outrageous and preposterous claims of being able to see into the future. Since the unfortunate mishap at the beleaguered SCOAN ministry, a plethora of opinion pieces has flooded the electronic media – with some calling for his head. A lot of commentators are also crusading for his outright prosecution, which I am pretty certain is not going to happen. However, his army of defenders has not slept on their oars; they have been very busy. The damage control has taken the tone of aggression. In one of such articles by a certain John Howard, he argued that those critics who do not take cognisance of the plane that flew by minutes before the disaster are being intellectually lazy, which I will take him on my own terms. Now, let’s hypothetically assume that it was a sabotage based on his Newtonian Laws of motion. On the other hand, I want us to push the boundary of reason. This is a man who claims prophetic powers par excellence. He is able to predict disaster half way across the globe, and he couldn’t see the evil machinations of saboteurs right under his nose? This is the question he is supposed to answer and not whether it was a foul play. Unless he wants to disclaim his third eye capabilities like everyone else, which the logical conclusion is incontrovertible – fakery. Our desire to whisk away all our problems by a flick of a wand has provided a fertile field for the African spiritual industry. And none epitomises the army of con men who go by the title: reverend, pastor, apostle, prophet, evangelist like T B Joshua. They have cleverly taken advantage of this human condition and milking it till thy kingdom come. Their ascendency in Ghana, at least, started in the 70s when the pillars of the Ghanaian economy collapsed under the weight of corruption. In the 80s, there was a spate of fraudulent confessions by the main victims of these heartless blood suckers – ‘witches’. And as we began to pay dearly for our corruption and incompetence, people run en masse into the arms of these men. Of course, it is not only Ghana and for that matter Africa that we have such tendencies, there has been ample studies to show that there is a correlation between the activities of the far right numbskulls like the Ku Klux Klan and economic depression.