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Five Nigerians among Top 10 Richest Pastors in the World

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RichestLifestyle has compiled a list of 10 richest pastors in the world and their individual net worth and 5 of the pastors who made the list are from Nigeria, with Bishop David Oyedepo, founder of Living Faith Ministries aka Winners Chapel, topping the list. He has $150 million to his name.

A pastor is an ordained leader of a Christian congregation who serves humanity by providing guidance to people.

Famous Iyeye Ayemere, a reknown blogger with omgnaija.com went further to say that being a man of God has its advantages as some have become very rich through their churches and other investments.

It is not however clear how the blogs arrived at their figures but they reported that many pastors worldwide are building multi-million dollar empires, flying around in private jets, driving fancy cars and being owners of breathtaking mansions all over the world.

According to Ayemere, these millionaire men of God are very popular all over the world.

Below is the top 10 richest pastors in the world as of 2014:

1. David Oyedepo – Net worth: $150 Million (Nigeria)
Bishop David Oyedepo founded the Living Faith World Outreach Ministry in 1981 and it has since grown to become one of the largest congregations in Africa.
Every Sunday, three services are held at the Faith tabernacle, Canaan Land in Otta. Oyedepo owns private jets and homes in the US and the UK. He recently celebrated his 60th birthday.

2. Chris Oyakhilome – Net worth: $50 Million (Nigeria)
Christian Oyakhilome known popularly as Pastor Chris is a Nigerian minister who is the founding president of Believers’ LoveWorld Incorporated also known as Christ Embassy, a Bible-based Christian ministry headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria.
His church has more than 40,000 members, several of whom are successful entrepreneurs and politicians. His ministry runs several arms including the Healing School, Rhapsody of Realities (a daily devotional with global reach), and an N.G.O called the Innercity Missions as well as three Christian television channels: LoveWorld TV, LoveWorld SAT and LoveWorld Plus.

3. Benny Hinn – Net worth: $42 Million (United States)
Benny Hinn is a well-known Christian evangelist and Bible teacher who practices faith healing. This Israeli-American televangelist earned wealth through his ministry and evangelical program.
He is well-known for his regular miracle healing crusades, which are held in large stadiums in major cities and broadcasted on TV.
His thirty-minute TV program This Is Your Day is among the world’s most-watched Christian programs, seen on various Christian television networks.

4. Creflo Dollar: Net Worth: $27 Million (United States)
Creflo is an American televangelist, pastor and a Word of Faith teacher. He is a founder of the non-denominational World Changers Church International.
He oversees his ministry with his wife, Taffi Dollar. He has built a multimillion dollar ministry on the message “It is the will of God for you to prosper in every way.”
Over the years the ministry has grown rapidly and the church formerly called International Covenant Ministries was renamed World Changers Church International (WCCI).

5. Billy Graham – Net worth: $25 Million (United States)
He is an ordained Southern Baptist minister who rose to celebrity status in 1949 reaching a core constituency of white, middle-class, moderately conservative Protestants.
He founded the Billy Graham Evangelist Association in 1950. Graham operates a variety of media and publishing outlets

6. T. D. Jakes – Net worth: $18 Million (United States)
Thomas Dexter popularly called T. D. Jakes is the Apostle/Bishop of The Potter’s House, a non-denominational American mega-church that has over 30,000 members.
His ministry’s annual revival MegaFest draws more than 100,000 people.

7. T.B. Joshua – Net worth: $15 Million (Nigeria)
Prophet Temitope Balogun Joshua commonly referred to as T. B. Joshua, is a Christian minister and televangelist.
 He is the leader and founder of the The Synagogue, Church of All Nations (SCOAN), which runs a Christian television station called Emmanuel TV. His humanitarian works include education, healthcare and rehabilitation programs.

8. Matthew Ashimolowo and Chris Okotie, both from Nigeria.

8. Matthew Ashimolowo – Net worth: $10 Million (Nigeria)
Matthew is the Senior Pastor of Kingsway International Christian Center (KICC) in London, the largest Pentecostal church in the United Kingdom.
It has assets worth more than $40 million and earns profit of more than $10 million.

8. Chris Okotie – Net worth: $10 Million (Nigeria)
Christopher Oghenebrorie Okotie popularly referred to as Chris Okotie is the leader of the Household of God Church International Ministries, a Pentecostal congregation in Lagos, founded since February 1987.
He is an automobile lover and owns several posh cars which include a Mercedes S600, Rolls-Royce, Hummer and Porsche.

9. Joseph Prince – Net worth: $5 Million (Singapore)
Annual salary of this Singaporean pastor is $550,000. Pastor Joseph Prince is the senior pastor of the New Creation Church in Singapore.
The New Creation Church’s financial income was reported at $44.7 million US dollars in 2008. He hosts a religious program called “Destined to Reign.”
He has addressed many congregations worldwide.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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