Religious swindlers: How fake pastors, imams entrap desperate miracle seekers for financial, sexual gains

Agatha Tuotamuno was not born deaf. One Saturday in 1986, two days after her sixth birthday, she felt a tingling sensation in her ear that made her uncomfortable.

According to her, it was as though there were tiny stones in her ears and she shook her head tirelessly in an attempt to get it out.

“I didn’t tell anyone because I lived with my stepmother then. My mother left me and my siblings when I was barely three years old and my father married another woman almost immediately.

“So, when the sensation in my ear began, I didn’t pay much attention since I felt no pain and it didn’t affect my hearing,” she said in an interview with Sunday PUNCH.

However, after a few weeks without remedy, things got worse. Agatha began to hear a long, unending sound that crescendoed mostly at night when everywhere was quiet.

At that point, the ear had also begun to produce puss-like liquid mixed with blood and was accompanied by a gnawing pain.

“I remember that day like it was yesterday when I put my fingers in my ears in an attempt to silence the noise and saw blood. I ran to my stepmother since my dad was at work. He used to work with an oil firm that operated offshore.

“My stepmother just gave me some paracetamol tablets and told me to tell her what I put in my ears. I explained to her that it just happened and she started hitting me.

“She called me all sorts of names and asked me to tell her what coven I was in. Before my dad could return, I was taken to a church where I was tied and asked to confess,” she added.

When her father, Gregory Tuotamuno, returned home days after, the situation had worsened.

She said she was dragged from church to church with promises of her getting better from age six till she turned 10.

At that point, Agatha had become completely deaf in both ears. Her dad also took ill and joined her in search of solutions from one prayer house to another.

She added, “There was no place we (my dad and I) did not go. We spent thousands of naira. We paid N20,000 for some liquid and another N25,000 for prayer. The value of N10,000 at that time should be equivalent to N200,000 now. So, it was a lot of money.

“We paid a pastor and their team to fast for us and we were still forced to pay another money for deliverance.

“One of the pastors took me to the river and stripped me naked. He fetched water from the river and poured it inside my ears. He said he was rinsing my ear from the evil forces. With different pastors came different prophecies.

“One told me it (deafness) was from my biological mother’s side and that I needed cleansing. He didn’t even know my mother had died because he was asking that we bring her for deliverance, too, until we told him that she died when I was way younger.

“The other one said it was from my father’s elder sister. My father has only one brother. He doesn’t have a sister. There were a lot of inconsistencies in the prophecies but my parents believed so much in them.”

But it did not stop there. At age 16, after her father’s death, Agatha said her stepmother got a wave of a popular preacher visiting Port Harcourt, Rivers State, for the first time from South Africa where the ministry was based. She was asked to attend the cleric’s event.

She said after spending so much on transport from Omoku, which is about an hour to Port Harcourt, they had to lodge themselves in an expensive hotel where the pastor was said to be lodged as well.

“We just wanted to see this man. We wanted to touch him and receive our miracle. I remember very well how my stepmother gave all the money in her savings then. She was still working at the Ministry of Education, had worked for more than 20 years, and was due for retirement soon, but she wanted me to be healed.

“She gave all her money when the man mentioned my case and she was expecting a miracle which never happened.

“As I chat with you, I am still deaf. Those things did not work. We even paid for a counseling session; the pastor’s team said it was N12,000 for a session and N2,000 to get one anointing water they claimed was from Jerusalem or Jordan.

“But, after all that, we heard that the man scammed some people by collecting their cars and even slept with some people’s wives before leaving back for South Africa. It was a serious scandal then in the South-South,” she noted.

All that didn’t stop Agatha from attending another crusade in Lagos in another popular Pentecostal mission that had started to become popular. After all the payments and buying all the ‘materials’ for the prayer and deliverance, she did not get well.

Instead, she claimed the pastor had made some sexual advances at her by touching her breasts during the prayer. By the time she went to hospital when she was almost 25, the doctors said it was too late, as she had an advanced case of tinnitus.

“Surgery, according to them, would not help. After I drank all that those prophets recommended, washed my ears with all sorts of liquid, and spent millions, I still did not get the so-called healing and miracle they mouthed.

“I have come to understand God on my own, and I am ashamed to even admit I ever paid anyone money in the name of getting healing. God has healed me. That is what I believe. Even though I am still deaf, I don’t need any healing that I would have to pay for,” she said with a soft sigh.

Like Agatha, like Madam Toyo

A restaurateur in Lagos, Madam Toyo, got the shock of her life when a pastor in the Ikorodu area of Lagos asked that they spend the night together to ‘enable the Holy Spirit to breathe’ upon her.

“He told me with so much confidence as if he knew I would give in. I was married but had no children. It happened in 2014, and I was already nine years into my marriage.

“My family had begun to complain. My husband’s people, I am sure, also complained but he kept on shielding me from them.

“So, when I heard that a ‘powerful man of God’ was in Ikorodu and that he had the gift of vision, I told my husband that we should go. After much pushing, he followed me there on one of their Tuesday services, and the man told my husband in a prophecy that his boss was sitting on his promotion,” she said.

“My husband owned his own business. He sold books and stationery in various places around Lagos and Ogun. So, it couldn’t have been true that his boss – which he did not have – was sitting on a promotion – which he did not need,” she added as she chuckled at intervals.

But that was the last time her husband followed her there. He had also warned her to stop attending the services but Toyo said she did not stop. She said she wanted to look beyond the obvious glitch and get her ‘miracle baby’.

As she became consistent, she said some women in the church began to get closer to her and ask her some questions about her family and home. She said she became more open to them because she thought they were in the same situation. She had no idea it was all part of a grand plan to financially extort her.

“After a while, the pastor started borrowing money from me with promises to pay back. He borrowed N200,000 at first and then said I should make it N500,000 by adding N400,000, which I did.

“I also started giving donations. I was paying tithes. I gave ‘sacrificial seeds’. Even after he asked me to sleep with him and I said no, I continued to go to church. I didn’t think anything was wrong.

“His slogan then was, “God can use anybody.” So, I thought adultery was just one of his flaws and it would not stop God from using him.

“Sometimes, I even closed down my shop for days and joined them in their prayers there in Ikorodu. My husband became really concerned and begged me to stop. My desperation did not make me see that I was being used,” she added.

Toyo said the day the pastor said God told him that it was her mother-in-law who was responsible for her barrenness was the day the scale fell off her eyes.

“My husband’s parents died long before we got married. In fact, my husband’s mother had no siblings who were still alive.

“I stood there as he gave me those prophecies and I was crying because I knew my husband had warned me from Day One. I stopped going to the church but asked the pastor for a refund of the money he owed me. He owed me N1.24m.