The General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, has publicly faulted media reports accusing him of holding a placard to protest against former President Goodluck Jonathan’s government.
Addressing congregants on Sunday morning, November 1, 2026, at the RCCG Redemption City along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the cleric expressed concern over media misrepresentations and the lack of basic fact-checking among commentary circles.
Setting the timeline straight, Pastor Adeboye noted that the exercise in question took place in February 2020 during the second term of former President Muhammadu Buhari, long after Goodluck Jonathan concluded his presidential tenure in May 2015.
”Recently, just one mischievous somebody wrote in the papers or said somehow, ‘Pastor Adeboye is a very wicked man. After all, we know that not too long ago, he carried a placard against President Goodluck Jonathan,'” Pastor Adeboye recalled.
“True, I carried a placard. I can’t deny that. It was important. It was a prayer walk. We wanted to pray. But I carried the placard in 2020. Jonathan ceased to be president in 2015. I carried the placard five years into the second term of Buhari.”
Explaining the origin of the march, the RCCG General Overseer revealed that the procession followed a national directive issued by the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).
The umbrella Christian body had declared a three-day period of fasting and prayer, calling on churches across the country to conduct localised prayer walks around their premises to intercede against rising insecurity, abductions, and killings in Nigeria.
The chairman of CAN instructed all churches to execute prayer walks near their respective worship centers, an instruction the cleric said he simply carried out.
Reflecting on his exposure to journalism courses during his university days in the 1960s, Pastor Adeboye admonished media practitioners to uphold professional standards of verification. He criticized the initial distortion of the narrative and expressed disappointment over how uncritically commentators and the public accepted the false timeline.
”I remember in those days in the Department of Journalism, when you go there and you take a course, they talked about something called investigative journalism,” Adeboye said. “That things don’t appear as they may seem. Investigate, if you have a story, before you take it to the press.”
The clarification resolves years of recurring online debate surrounding the 2020 photo, confirming that the exercise was a church-led spiritual intercession under President Muhammadu Buhari’s tenure rather than a political demonstration targeted at former President Goodluck Jonathan.
