Connect with us

Uncategorized

Billionaire Pastors Running Nigeria’s Megachurches

Published

on

Kindly share this post

When a guesthouse belonging to one of Nigeria’s leading Christian pastors collapsed last month, killing 115 mostly South African pilgrims, attention focussed on the multimillion-dollar “megachurches” that form a huge, untaxed sector of Africa’s top economy, according to Reuters

Hundreds of millions of dollars change hands each year in these popular Pentecostal houses of worship, which are modelled on their counterparts in the United States.

Some of the churches can hold more than 200,000 worshippers and, with their attendant business empires, they constitute a significant section of the economy, employing tens of thousands of people and raking in tourist dollars, as well as exporting Christianity globally.
 
But exactly how much of Nigeria’s $510 billion GDP they make up is difficult to assess, since the churches are, like the oil sector in Africa’s top energy producer, largely opaque entities.

“They don’t submit accounts to anybody,” said Bismarck Rewane, economist and CEO of Lagos consultancy Financial Derivatives. “At least six church leaders have private jets, so they have money. How much? No one really knows.”

When Nigeria recalculated its GDP in March, its economy became Africa’s biggest, as previously poorly captured sectors such as mobile phones, e-commerce and its prolific “Nollywood” entertainment industry were specifically included in estimates.

There was no such separate listing for the “megachurches”, whose main source of income is “tithe”, the 10 percent or so of their income that followers are asked to contribute.

As the churches have charity status, they have no obligation to open their books, and certainly don’t have to fill in tax returns — an exemption that is increasingly controversial in Nigeria, where poverty remains pervasive despite the oil riches.

The pastors argue their charity work should exempt them.

“We use the income of the church to build schools, we use the income of the church to serve the needs of the poor,” David Oyedepo, bishop of the popular Winners Chapel, told Reuters in an interview. “These are non-profit organisations.”

PASTORS ON FORBES LIST
Nonetheless, the surging popularity of the megachurches among the Christians who make up half of Nigeria’s 170 million population has propelled their preachers into the ranks of the richest people in Africa.

In 2011, Forbes magazine estimated the fortunes of Nigeria’s five richest pastors. Oyedepo topped the list, with an estimated net worth of $150 million.

He was followed by “Pastor Chris” Oyakhilome of Believers’ LoveWorld Incorporated, also known as the Christ Embassy and popular with executives and politicians, on $30 million to $50 million.

TB Joshua, pastor of the Synagogue Church of All Nations, at the centre of the recent diplomatic storm over the deaths in its guesthouse, was thought to have $10 million to $15 million.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) declined to comment on how churches fit into their GDP figures, but a source there said they were included as “non-profit”, which falls under “other services” in the latest figures. In 2013, the category contributed 2.5 percent of GDP, the same as the financial sector.

A former banker at Nigeria’s United Bank for Africa, who declined to be named, recalled being approached five years ago by a church that was bringing in $5 million a week from contributions at home or abroad.

“They wanted to make some pretty big investments: real estate, shares,” he said. “They wanted to issue a bond to borrow, and then use the weekly flows to pay the coupon.”

In the end, he said, the bank turned down the proposal on ethical grounds.

Yet Nigerian churches do often invest large amounts of their congregations’ money in shares and property, at home and abroad, he and another banking source said.

One pastor bought 3 billion naira ($18 million) worth of shares in the defunct Finbank, which later merged with FCMB, after it was rescued in a bail-out in 2009, a fund manager who handled the deal told Reuters. The pastor used a nominee trust account to keep his name off the books.

In 2011, Oyakhilome was investigated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and charged with laundering $35 million of contributions to his church in foreign bank accounts. He denied all wrongdoing and the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

Oyakhilome was not available for comment and Joshua’s media team declined a request for an interview with him.

MIDAS TOUCH

Oyedepo’s headquarters, “Canaanland”, is a 10,500-acre (4250-hectare) campus in Ota, outside the commercial capital Lagos. It comprises a university, two halls of accommodation, restaurants and a church seating 50,000 people, with a total overflow capacity of five times that.

“You can see that everything this man touches turns to gold,” Nigerian Agriculture Minister Akinwumi Adesina said in a speech at a reception for Oyedepo’s 60th birthday at Canaanland last month.

“May the grace of God abide with you,” he added, to a rapturous “Amen!” from the guests in a marquee.

Other dignitaries present included twice-president Olusegun Obasanjo and former military ruler Yakubu Gowon. A choir sang gospel songs as the guests cut an elaborate six-tiered cake and popped fizzy grape juice out of champagne bottles in golden wrapping — alcohol is banned in Canaanland.

The next day, he delivered four Sunday services in a row to tens of thousands of cheering followers, his white-suited figure projected onto large flat-screen televisions all around.

“From today, no evil spirit, no demon will survive the Almighty!” he shouted, and the crowd roared “Amen!”.

A spokesman said the church has 5,000 branches across Nigeria, and 1,000 more in 63 other countries across five continents. But Oyedepo’s empire also includes two fee-paying universities that he built from scratch, a publishing house for Christian self-help books, and an elite high school.

Other pastors have similarly diversified ways of getting the Gospel of Christian salvation out.

Oyakhilome owns magazines, newspapers and 24-hour TV station, and Joshua draws miracle-seekers from all over the world with claims that the holy water he has blessed cures otherwise incurable ailments such as HIV/AIDS.

Before Joshua built his 10,000-seat headquarters at Ikotun-Egbe in outer Lagos, the area was part swamp, part abandoned industrial estate.

Now, it is a boom town with shops, hotels, eateries and bars catering largely to the travellers who come not only from West Africa but also from all corners of the globe to hear his sermons. Joshua also runs a TV station.

“BLESSED BY THE LORD”

Guests entering Oyedepo’s birthday marquee in Canaanland would have seen a picture of the poor household in southwest Nigeria where he grew up, testament to a rags-to-riches story that many Nigerians would love to emulate.

Like U.S. televangelists, Winners Chapel preaches the “prosperity gospel” that faith in Jesus Christ lifts people out of poverty, and that message partly explains the explosion of the Pentecostal movement in sub-Saharan Africa, where misfortune and poverty are often seen as having supernatural causes.

“We see giving as the only way to be blessed. Blessing other people is a way of keeping the blessings flowing,” said Oyedepo, whose blessings include a Gulfstream V jet and several BMWs.

Giving to support the church and its work is something the faithful are encouraged to do, a Christian tradition that was a pillar of the Roman Catholic church in medieval Europe, just as it has been a major money-spinner for U.S. televangelists.

Aneke Chika, a business analyst in an oil services company, told Reuters on the steps of Oyedepo’s church that she set aside 20,000 naira of her 200,000 naira ($1,218) salary every month.

Asked about Forbes’ estimate of his fortune, Oyedepo told Reuters: “For me, to have fortune means someone who has what he needs at any point in time. I don’t see myself as having $150 million stacked up somewhere. Whatever way they found their figures, I am only able to say I am blessed by the Lord.”

He said he could not estimate the church’s total revenues or expenditure on items such as salaries because the various departments, including education, were too diverse.

The enterprises on the Canaanland campus, from the shops selling cold sodas and bread, to a woman boiling instant noodles and eggs for breakfast in a lodge, to pop-up book stalls hawking Oyedepo’s prolific literary output, are owned by the church’s estate, which employs their staff on its payroll, workers at all the outlets told Reuters.

Winners Chapel’s Corporate Affairs department said the church employed more than 18,000 people in Nigeria alone.

Oyedepo says the wealth the church gathers is invested in expanding it, and that if he did not use a private jet, he would be unable to oversee its many foreign operations and still return to Ota every week in time for Sunday’s worship.

Britain’s Charity Commission says it is reviewing potential conflicts of interest in his finances, and last month the Home Office (interior ministry) barred him from Britain, though it declined to say why.

Oyedepo said he knew nothing of the commission’s review, nor had the Home Office explained to him why he was barred.

A national conference to debate Nigeria’s constitution this year proposed that the megachurches should be taxed.

But with an election coming up in February, it is debatable whether President Goodluck Jonathan, who is close to several megapastors, would risk upsetting these influential men and their hefty congregations with a fat tax bill.

“There is no single government input on this premises,” Oyedepo told Reuters in the interview. “We supply our water, we make our roads, then you … say: ‘Let’s tax them’. For what?”


Kindly share this post

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek believes that technology makes life more exciting and helps improve the lives of people around Nigeria and indeed the world. So since 2007, we have devoted our energy to independent reportage of technology and how they affect lives.

Uncategorized

Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

Published

on

Kindly share this post

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.


Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

Published

on

Kindly share this post

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.


Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

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

Published

on

Kindly share this post

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.

 

 

 

 


Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Trending