Samuel Eleng and his wife are accusing the authorities of Living Faith Church a.k.a Winners Chapel of complicity in the disappearance of their two-year-old daughter,Praise who went missing April 17 2011.
According to Mr. Eleng the young family’s travail began on Easter Sunday last year when he and his wife went to the church for special Easter service. The couple dropped their twins Glory and Praise with teachers at the Sunday school section and they were given tags to proof that they had handed over their children to the teachers on duty. After the service Mrs. Eleng went to pick the children, but to her surprise she could only find Glory. Praise and none of the Sunday school teachers were around.
The agitated mother raised alarm, thus the unending search for the missing child began.
Speaking Mr. Eleng said,“I saw my wife around the vicinity of the Children’s Section, she was crying. She told me that Praise was missing,” Mr. Eleng explained, adding that they eventually got hold of one of the four teachers allegedly in charge of the children’s class, and that the said teacher was also confused regarding Praise’s whereabouts.
“She claimed not to know but advised us to check other classes. So we started moving around from class to class, around the church premises,” he said further, stressing that after the futile search, he and his wife became apprehensive but still hopeful and that they waited until after most people had gone home before reporting the issue to Oyedepo, who the couple said prayed and joined them in the search after he had told them that he did not see “any evil signal in the disappearance of the little girl.”
“I was thinking so many things; how can I come to the house of God and my child will suddenly disappear? Even if it was time for rapture, how can it just pick my child only?”, Mr. Samuel added.
Although, the case was reported to the police and they promptly swung into action doing some preliminary investigations, the irony of it all is none of the four teachers to whom the Praise was handed over to have been interrogated.
Mr. Eleng said he had made several attempts to get the four teachers interrogated to no avail, adding that in August last year, the police told him the church called and asked that the case be withdrawn as the little girl had been found, but that this was not true.
Provoked by the shoddy handling of the issue, Mr. Eleng said he went to the church to make some trouble and that right from then, Bishop Oyedepo stopped picking his calls.
He said he again met Oyedepo on 12 April, 2012, almost a year after Praise went missing and that after reminding him that his daughter had not been found, the Bishop told him to be prayerful for God to strengthen him so the child could be found. When our correspondent contacted the Divisional Police Oofficer, DPO, of Onipanu station at Ota, called Jide on phone this morning, he directed him to the Ogun State Police Public Relations Officer, PPRO, ASP Muyiwa Adejobi.
Adejobi confirmed the incident and gave an assurance that the matter will not be swept under the carpet.
It is true, there was a case like that being handled by a unit of the station called Juvenile and Women Centre (JWC).
“The DPO confirmed that his men are in Lagos looking for a suspect in the case. It is a case we may not be able to finish within a day or two. We will continue to monitor our men investigating the matter now that we have been fully briefed. The family should exercise patience. We understand their feelings. I can assure them that we will get to the root of the matter.”
The police spokesman further assured the family of the command’s readiness to assist get to the root of the matter.
If the family are not feeling comfortable with the way the police in Onipanu are handling the matter, you as a journalist can help them by giving them our numbers so they can get across to us. The DPO too will now step up action to ensure that the matter is accelerated,” he added.
One of the pastors of the church who spoke with our correspondent under anonymity disclosed that the case of the missing child and some matters going on in the church have forced many of the pastors to either resign or step aside.
He said: “my brother, I don’t want any problem with my life. As it is now, I will soon leave the church. Crises upon crisis all the time. Are we the only church in Nigeria? Daddy has lost grip of that place, that I can confirm but who are we to talk?