Tobi Adegboyega, the founder of the SPAC Nation church in the United Kingdom (UK), says his current travails are politically motivated.
The Nigerian pastor, who is at the centre of a UK deportation saga, said the persecution started after a member of parliament (MP) from his district alleged that he was advocating against the gay community.
In an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Monday, Adegboyega said the MP reported the church’s activities to the police.
He said the police could not investigate the allegations against him and the church because they were “all nonsensical”.
“You can’t claim that our proof is inflated without telling us why. The UK Metropolitan Police gathered charities in the UK and asked them to go to SPAC Nation. I wrote solutions for the home office,” he said.
“Truths must be backed with facts. For 10 years, we have been persecuted without one single move.
“Allegations without indictment, so why shouldn’t we suspect biases?
“We have a situation where people believed I was supporting certain political parties because one person believed that my agenda was to go against the gay community, and from that day, we have been to reconciliation meetings.
“The person wrote that my evangelical zeal was to make sure that the gay community in that area does not survive.
“He took dossiers of evidence against the church to the sacred ground of the parliament and submitted it to the internal affairs minister, who submitted it to the police, and the police came back to say that they couldn’t even investigate one thing because it was all nonsensical.
“The person is an MP, and the same person is sitting behind these things, making sure that he is not defeated.
“If there is any honour left in his system, what such men should do is apologise unless you’re saying the police authority of Great Britain is inept, which would be quite unfortunate.”
Adegboyega dismissed the deportation case against him, stressing that the focus should be on the contribution of his church to the safety and businesses of people in the UK.
“The country cannot deny it. There is no prime minister who can deny the result of the work we have done. When the metropolitan police came to the church, that was about three years ago; they sat down, and they came to learn,” he said.
“It is our result of how many lives have been saved, how many knives we have taken off the street, and how many businesses we created for this economy.
“We had a few hours of the tribunal, and in the tribunal, I was given a few hours to talk about the SPAC Nation, and we defended the honour of the SPAC Nation.”
