Writing By Gordon Anderson
On Saturday 10thAugust 2019, I read a report in Zimbabwe’s Herald Newspaper alleging the Southern African nation’s Belgium-based football captain Knowledge Musona was set to undergo surgery for a nagging ankle injury that has dogged his career for several years. My attention was drawn because headlines were rife several months earlier of Musona’s public testimony in The Synagogue, Church Of All Nations (SCOAN) in which he stated this ankle injury was healed after prayer at the well-known ministry of T.B. Joshua. Skeptics and cynics understandably capitalized on the news of his ‘impending operation’ to tout their adverse assertions about ‘miracles’ and paint Joshua’s ministry in a condescending light.
Merely hours later however, a fuming Musona took to his Twitter account to debunk the story, reaffirm his good health and decry the lies being unrepentantly peddled in the media. “I am not having ankle problems and I am not having an operation on my ankle! Please get your facts right first and stop writing false articles about me,” he angrily wrote to Robson Sharuko, the article’s author. However, reading between the lines, Knowledge was not the target of this flagrant falsehood – T.B. Joshua was. Musona’s story is just one of countless examples where the media have grossly misrepresented the cleric, choosing sensationalism over soundness, fiction over fact and bigotry over reality.
Last month, I saw a scandalous headline on Google News: ‘How Pastor TB Joshua Raped Me – Another Nigerian Woman Speaks’. The source was PM News, a Nigerian evening newspaper turned online outfit. A quick read revealed a clearly malicious attempt to drag Joshua’s name into the current quagmire of prominent pastors accused of sexual misconduct. The lady in question did not directly mention T.B. Joshua’s name and earlier articles suggested her sexual predator was actually a ‘prophet’ from the Celestial Church.
Merely hours later, PM News retracted their initial story and issued an apology, stating: “The reference to TB Joshua is regretted.” Shortly afterwards, the lady at the center of the scandal, Vicki Royce, tweeted: “Please media, stop accusing pastors. TB Joshua is NOT THE ONE!” She later admitted – after tales of her ‘running mad’ surfaced on social media – that she was ‘paid’ to formulate the story against the Nigerian cleric. But the ‘damage’ had been done. Casual observers glancing at headlines had already formulated ill-informed conclusions and multiple blogs had reposted the initial story with all defamatory details in place. Shortly afterwards, more Nigerian media jumped on the bandwagon to propagate wild claims of a lady named Bisola who made similarly brazen allegations – despite video evidence she previously apologized for her ‘lies’ against Joshua and admitted to mental instability...READ MORE
