How woman delivered monster in church
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This story contains a picture that some may find disturbing. Readers discretion is advised. By Simon Ebegbulem, Benin City
Like people always say, “wonders shall never end”. Benin City residents were shocked on Tuesday when a pregnant woman, currently at large, was delivered of a creature that resembled a horse during a prayer session at the World Libration Ministry, Benin City.
The drama was said to have started when the General Overseer of the church, Evangelist Silva Iyamu, commenced the prayer session, called, ‘Miracle hour’. Sunday Vanguard found that people from neighouring states throng the church in search of miracles, as a result of which there were hundreds of people during the programme. The pastor reportedly prophesied that they had a pregnant woman in the hall but that what was in her belly was not the baby she craved.
According to the personal assistant to the pastor, Prince John Ogbovoh, who claimed to have witnessed the prayer session and the subsequent delivery of the woman, “It was a miraculous thing. She was not the only one that was delivered in the church. The pastor did it for a lot of people but this one was spectacular.
Evangelist Silva Iyamu and Mrs. Veronica Egiebor, ‘the nurse’ that took delivery
The woman, we were told, had been in her matrimonial home for 11 years without a baby and the pastor said there was ‘a woman here for 11 years, no child,’ that the person always got pregnant but whenever she went for test, it will show and at another time it will not show again”.
Ogbovoh continued: “So the woman came out and the pastor said ‘let us put you in an all night on Friday, but the woman pleaded with the congregation to go on with the prayers since she may not be able to wait. So the pastor now agreed. The pastor called her and asked the men to give little space and the pastor insisted that something inside the woman was not a human being, he said it was a funny creature.
When the creature came out, it did not look like a human being but it looked like an animal”. Asked about the whereabouts of the woman and her name, the pastor’s aide explained:”We don’t even know her or whether she came with any member of her family. Nobody knows where she came from. We don’t always take records of people who came from outside Benin City but we know our members. We were expecting the woman to come back here today (Wednesday). People always come here to receive miracles and after that many of them come back to thank God for delivering them”.
He narrated further: “When it happened, they asked her to go and wash up, the lady pastor assisted her. I remember she fell down and was unconscious and, sometimes, the pastor will ask members to leave the hall to allow for ventilation. So after she delivered the creature, there was pandemonium in the church. We did not even know when the woman left. In fact, the pastor was asking me where the woman was?, so we searched for her but we could not find her. I am sure the woman was ashamed, but God has done a miracle in her life and she is not supposed to be ashamed.
*Baby or monster? The scene of delivery…on Tuesday
However, I believe she will come back because God has removed the burden that has stopped her from getting pregnant for years. The dead creature was left for a while for people to see. This morning, the people now ordered that they should throw the creature away because it is now becoming an embarassment for us in the church”. The nurse who delivered the woman of the creature, Mrs Veronica Igiebor, corroborated the PA’s story.
“I was there; it’s not a story, yesterday, it seemed like a miracle”, she said. “The pastor poured anointing oil and a sachet of water on the woman and asked everybody to pray, he said, labour is going to start now. So the woman was swinging her body and finally she held somebody’s leg. She pressed and she pushed harder and something dropped and she fell. Behold my brother, I have never seen that kind of thing in my life before. People were calling it goat. But it looked like a horse. The object had a long neck, the ears were long. It was exactly like a horse, although it was in a baby form.
But the pastor said nobody should touch it because it was demonic. Everybody ran away; I don’t know when the woman vanished.The story I heard about that woman is that the husband’s mother wanted him to marry another woman. It was said that this particular woman now trained the husband in the university. It was said the lady sold vegetable to get money to train the man. But when the man wanted to get married to her, the mother disagreed, rather brought another woman for him to marry. But the woman as expected refused to leave because she has laboured and obviously some body may have said okay since she refused to leave the man she will suffer. I guess that was why she has not been able to have any baby since.”
Gen. Overseer of the church, Evang.Iyamu, speaking on the incident, stated: “When we were praying, a word of knowledge came that somebody had an issue with pregnancy.
Sometimes, when she goes to ultra-sound, the pregnancy is either confirmed or not there.
While the deliverance was on, we noticed that the woman was bleeding. We asked her to stand out, barely few minutes we heard people screaming. We thought it was a child, but I remember that when we were praying, I said what ever is hindering her from getting a baby should leave. Something of that nature, I’m not a medical doctor. So, I don’t know the appropriate word to use. So, when it came out, everybody was like weeping. It’s something we haven’t seen for a very long time. So, she was still bleeding and she collapsed. So we had to order everybody outside for ventilation to come in before she was revived and the women around cleaned her up”. Asked if the woman is a member of the church, he said: “The woman only came to my office asking for prayers, because she is not a Benin person”.
Pastor shuts church premises where woman delivered horse
Written by Uchechukwu Olisah, Benin City
Saturday, 06 October 2012
Door of the church (left) under lock. Inset: Foal delivered by the woman
The store-like structure, which is an attachment to the perimeter fence of a compound along old Benin- Sapele Road in Benin City was padlocked. The place was deserted. There was no sign of life. A development which raised questions regarding the whereabouts of the General Overseer of the church and members of his congregation.
The structure used to host an otherwise relatively known and modest pentecostal church, the World Liberation Ministry. It came into the limelight a few weeks ago, specifically on Tuesday, 12 September, 2012, when the General Overseer, Evangelist Silva Wealth Iyamu and some members of the church claimed that a woman was delivered of a horse-like creature during one of the church’s programmes.
The news of the development even with the unbelief expressed by not a few persons practically turned the place into a pilgrimage centre of sort, as many people thronged the place, some to satisfy their curiosity; others particularly the miracle seeking ones, to see if they could get their own share of miracle or deliverance as the case may be.
But when Saturday Tribune visited the church at its old Benin-Sapele Road address on Tuesday, 2 October, 2012, there was nothing to show that a church of any kind existed at the place, as not even a message was left behind for anyone seeking information on the church, giving an impression that the pastor and members of the church might have absconded following doubts and concerns raised over the supposed ‘miraculous birth’ of a foal-like creature in the church by a woman said to be attending one of the church’s prophesy programmes.
Through enquiries from some people in the neighbourhood, Saturday Tribune got to know that the church had moved to a new location. The search for the new location of the church ended that same Tuesday when Saturday Tribune stumbled on a banner bearing the photograph of the Senior Pastor, Evangelist Silva Wealth Iyamu with the inscription ‘Welcome to Canaan Land: a land flowing with signs and wonders of God’ at a junction of a road, off the Limit Road (Godwin Abbé Road), off Sapele Road, Benin City.
A further drive down this road and to the left of it, is the World Liberation Ministry’s new site. The new structure is apparently a work in progress. The structure which is obviously temporary, lies on a space of land measuring about 100 x 100 feet. It is an open structure standing on planks with corrugated zinc roof.
The mission was presumably simple: to find out again the whereabout of the woman said to have given birth to the foal (baby horse), to find out if the pastor or any other member of the church had seen the woman since the claim of her birth of a foal was made, if the woman had come to the church for thanksgiving, why the pastor has purportedly refused to honour the invitation of the Edo State chapter of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN), and among other things his reaction to calls in some quarters for his arrest if he failed to produce the ‘miracle birth’ woman.
Before locating the church’s new site, several phone calls were put across to the senior pastor, all of which he did not pick or returned. And so when Saturday Tribune finally got to the place, it found that the church was filled to capacity; bursting at it seem, with shouts of ‘alleluia’ and ‘amen’ intermittently renting the air. It was another of one of the church’s programmes with Evangelist Iyamu presiding. Indeed, for whatever reasons the once sleepy church at its old Benin-Sapele Road is now overflowing with people and activities at its new home in just a few weeks after the claim of ‘miraculously’ expelling a ‘demonic creature’ from a yet unknown woman.
However, in pursuance of its mission, Saturday Tribune reached the Personal Assistant to the Senior Pastor of the church, Prince Jon Ogbovoh, who was also at the programme. Prince Ogbovoh assured Saturday Tribune correspondent that he was going to book an appointment for him with Pastor Iyamu. Besides, Prince Ogbovoh also agreed to the correspondent’s request that he be allowed to take some photographs with the proviso that photographs of the pastor presiding over the programme should not be taken.
At this juncture, the correspondent became curious and then asked Ogbovoh the reason the pastor did not want photographs of his to be taken. Ogbovoh said after the ‘miraculous’ occurrence of the ‘horse-birth’ incident, a section of the media started a negative campaign against the pastor. From Ogbovoh’s explanation, it could be deduced that it was partly to starve off the undeservedly negative campaign that Pastor Iyamu decided to limit his contact with the media.
When the correspondent was about taking shots of the congregation as agreed with Ogbovoh, some three men stormed out of various parts of the church and accosted him with a warning not to take any shot or his iPad would be seized and he would be thrown out of the church premises. The incident perhaps confirmed the media-phobia that seemed to be enveloping the church and its leadership. Further attempts to have the interview with Pastor Iyamu did not yield any result on that Tuesday. When he finally picked a call from Saturday Tribune, he asked the correspondent to call his Personal Assistant. When the call was put to Ogbovoh, the Personal Assistant promised to schedule the interview between the correspondent and his boss for Wednesday.
On Wednesday, 03 October, Saturday Tribune correspondent set out again to see if Pastor Iyamu would grant the audience for the interview. This was not to be as the corespondent could not reach the pastor since he was also presiding over a programme at the church. But the Personal Assistant who promised to call when the pastor was free only did so that Wednesday night to say that he was sorry he could not make the call as pledged.
‘How we delivered woman of horse’
Evangelist Silver Wealth Iyamu, the General Overseer of the World Liberation Ministry, found himself in a controversy September 11, 2012 when a woman was said to have been barren for over fifteen years after marriage allegedly delivered a creature that looked like a horse in his church located in the heart of Benin City.
The incident attracted attention both from Nigeria and abroad and it was reported by Sunday Vanguard. It would be recalled that while a consultant gynecologist, Dr. Jerry Uwaifo, said it was not medically possible for a woman to deliver an animal, the church members insisted that it was a miracle.
However, Sunday Vanguard met Wealth,on Wednesday, after a crusade at the Benin Cultural Center, where several people also reportedly received miracles of different types, to inquire about the incident of September last year and he disclosed that the woman in question, who disappeared shortly after the delivery at the church, resurfaced weeks later to see him in his office.
*Evangelist Silver Wealth Iyamu
Asked about the woman, the young evangelist narrated: “Our church is a prophetic one and people come all the time and we don’t really know where they come from. They come all over the state and we don’t have the time to find out who they are. On that particular day, that was one of the miracles that happened in the church.
After the miracle, the woman visited twice and she pleaded that she didn’t want to go public so that she won’t be stigmatized. And we agreed because such miracles are for the church and not for the public. I was actually shocked when I read them in the papers.”
“As for the woman”, he continued, “Yes, she attended service once or twice after that incident. She came to see me in the office but pleaded that she did not want attention and that, that was her family decision. She came before Christmas to visit us and I asked her how she was doing she said all was well that she resided in Delta and doing well in her business.
God is working miracles every day and I thank God he is using some of us to do this. Miracles are mysteries, an ordinary man cannot understand the face of the spirit because those who are born of the flesh are of the flesh. They see miracle they don’t understand except if their heart is prepared to understand.
It is just unfortunate that we criticize every good thing that comes to us. Even Jesus Christ was accused that he cast out demons with evil powers. As a man of God that is used to signs and wonders, people must criticize you, I believe that until you are totally rejected, you cannot be totally accepted.
Criticism is part of our ministry, some persons have criticized us in the past, but today they are members of my church. They have found out the truth. Those who are criticizing, I pray for them that God should open their eyes so that they find out the truth and they understand that the gospel we preach is goes with signs and wonders”.
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