Johannesburg - Multimillionaire South African businessman Tim Tebeila rushed to Lagos last Sunday to help his friend, the preacher TB Joshua, deal with the aftermath of the fatal collapse of a guesthouse on his church grounds.
Joshua, head of the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), has been widely criticised for contributing to the calamity, which killed some 84 South African churchgoers and several from other nations as well as Nigerian construction workers, and for the way he responded to it.
But Tebeila, executive chairman of the major coal company Sekoko Resources and other businesses, defended Joshua and the church on all counts.
Tebeila had been described to this newspaper as head of SCOAN in South Africa, but he insisted on Saturday that he was just an ordinary member of the church.
However, he does have more resources than most members and he mobilised them this past week through his Tim Tebeila Foundation to help the victims of the tragedy.
Tebeila said it was not widely known that SCOAN had spent millions of its money transporting injured followers to hospital in its own seven ambulances as well as paying for their hospital treatment and food.
Speaking in a phone interview from Lagos on Saturday, Tebeila dismissed criticism – which came even from South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Co-operation and senior officials of the Nigerian government – that SCOAN had not co-operated fully with the authorities in their efforts to rescue survivors of the accident.
Nigerian rescue officials said that church officials had initially not allowed rescue workers on to the site.
“When something like this happens, there is always criticism. In fact, the church is working closely with both the Nigerian and South African governments together to deal with this tragedy,” he insisted.
Tebeila also defended Joshua’s nonchalant first reaction to the accident on Friday, September 12, which many also saw as being callous.
The post referred to “a news story currently being reported by the media regarding an incident that happened today” and added: “The few people that were there are being rescued.”
Joshua’s Facebook post also said: “What you wish to others, God wishes to you,” suggesting to some that he was warning that those who criticised him for this disaster would face divine retribution.
Tebeila saw it differently, saying that immediately after the building collapsed, just before noon last Friday, church officials had not realised that so many people were in the guesthouse.
Joshua has also been criticised for refusing to take responsibility for the accident, including delaying several days before issuing a statement expressing condolences to the victims and also insisting that a mysterious aircraft – possibly sent by the Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram – had somehow caused the collapse.
Nigerian government officials have instead said they suspect that the building collapsed because the church was adding extra storeys to the four-storey building without reinforcing the foundations.
Officials have said they are investigating and have threatened to confiscate the church property if they find Joshua was at fault for the collapse – though Nigerian observers are generally sceptical about such claims, saying Joshua is too rich and powerful and politically connected to be punished.
Tebeila dismissed this criticism too, saying that the visual recordings of an aircraft flying six times around SCOAN’s Prayer Mountain and four times around the church building before it collapsed were highly suspicious and needed to be investigated before any conclusions were reached about the cause of the accident.
And he dismissed the explanation that the building had collapsed because of weak foundations, saying that if that were the cause it would have fallen sideways – whereas in fact it had collapsed inwards, like a building deliberately demolished. This suggested it had been brought down on purpose – perhaps by “silent explosives”, he said.
Sunday Independent