By Solomon OKPO | The Evangelist News Desk
The General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Pastor Enoch Adeboye, has dismissed reports linking a photograph of him carrying a placard to a protest against former President Goodluck Jonathan, describing the claims as misleading and a deliberate misrepresentation of facts.
Adeboye, who spoke during the church’s November Thanksgiving Service on Sunday, clarified that the incident occurred in February 2020, five years after Jonathan left office in May 2015. He explained that the placard was carried during a prayer walk organised to seek divine intervention over insecurity, terrorism and killings across Nigeria under the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari.
The respected cleric acknowledged carrying the placard, insisting that the exercise was strictly spiritual and not politically motivated. “True, I carried a placard. I can’t deny that. It was important. It was a prayer walk. We wanted to pray,” he said, faulting a journalist for allegedly twisting the circumstances surrounding the event.
Adeboye further recalled that the prayer walk followed a directive for churches to organise prayer exercises around their premises. The February 2, 2020 event saw him lead RCCG members from the church’s national headquarters in Ebute Meta towards Atan Cemetery in Yaba, Lagos, following a three-day fasting and prayer programme declared by the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) over the country’s worsening security challenges. The placard he carried bore the inscription, “All Souls Are Precious to God.”
The RCCG leader also criticised the failure of some journalists to investigate and verify information before publication, recalling lessons from his journalism studies in the 1960s, when he learnt the importance of fact-checking and investigative reporting. He maintained that the photograph had been wrongly presented to create the impression that he opposed Jonathan’s administration, stressing that the chronology of events clearly contradicted the claim.
