Bishop David Oyedepo
Nigeria’s richest pastor and Winners’ Chapel founder, David Oyedepo, flaunts a vast business empire worth billions of naira. And there is no end to his material acquisitions.
To thousands of his devotees, David Olaniyi Oyedepo, billionaire businessman and presiding bishop at the Living Faith Church, better known as Winners’ Chapel, is a preacher of immense spiritual endowment. Fondly addressed as Papa by his congregation, Oyedepo is held in awe – the kind reserved for deities. The cleric’s deistic clout, however, transcends his Winners’ Chapel enclave.
To many outside his fold, the prosperity preacher, who owns homes in London and the United States, and has been owner of four private jets so far, is gleaned from his insatiable material bequest. In 2010, Forbes, the respected American business magazine which keeps a tab on the world’s rich, listed Oyedepo as Nigeria’s wealthiest pastor, with an estimated networth of $150mn (about N23bn).
Oyedepo is only followed on the rich list by another Nigerian flamboyant pastor, Chris Oyakhilome of the Believers’ Loveworld Ministries, a.k.a. Christ Embassy, whose worth was put at between N4.7bn and N7bn. In Nigeria, Oyedepo conveniently leads the growing list of pastorpreneurs, church founders exploiting the passion and emotion that Christianity commands to feather their nests.
A proponent of prosperity Christianity, Oyedepo is unapologetic about the materialistic tinge to his gospel. In taking to ministering, God, he repeatedly claims, told him to “make my people rich”. He describes his prosperity-centric teachings as “covenant software for programming yourself into victories and triumphs”.
With abiding faith in God, there are no limits, he insists, to how prosperous a man can be. And God’s word, he says, is a goldmine. “It is loaded with treasures — treasures for your pleasure, treasures for your comfort,” he pontificates.
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