Pastor Enoch Adeboye, General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, on Sunday clarified that a widely circulated photograph of him carrying a placard during a prayer walk was taken in 2020 and was not a protest against former President Goodluck Jonathan.
Speaking at the church’s November Thanksgiving service, Adeboye expressed surprise at reports linking the exercise to Jonathan’s presidency and faulted journalists for misrepresenting the incident.
“But I carried the placard in 2020. Jonathan ceased to be president in 2015. I carried the placard five years in the second term of Buhari,” he said.
Adeboye explained that the church had directed congregations to organise prayer walks seeking divine intervention over insecurity and killings in Nigeria. He participated in the walk in Ebute Metta, Lagos.
He accused a journalist of altering the context of the event.
“But a journalist twisted and said I did what I did in 2015. And everybody swallowed it,” Adeboye said.
Drawing on his time as a student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in the 1960s, the cleric recalled lessons on investigative journalism.
“I remember in those days in the Department of Journalism, when you go there and you take a course, they talked about something called investigative journalism. That things don’t appear as they may seem. Investigate, if you have a story, before you take it to the press,” he said.
Adeboye also criticised selective media reporting of comments he made during an engagement with American figures about the abduction of schoolchildren in Nigeria. He said a report focused only on part of his remarks while omitting others, including appeals for further international support against terrorism sponsors.
“I’m talking to those of you in the creative industry. Nobody checked,” he said, concluding: “God have mercy on journalists.”
