For DeoluAdeboye, pastor, administrator, fashion entrepreneur, and son of Nigeria’s most influential Pentecostal patriarch, being in the news is nothing new. But rarely does the headline read like a courtroom thriller.

The latest chapter began not on a pulpit but in a courtroom, where Justice Alexander Owoeye of the Federal High Court in Lagos issued an unusually firm decree: no security agency, not even the ever-omnipresent EFCC, is to arrest, question, or harass Adeboye or his fellow directors at Ronchess Global Resources Plc over a disputed N8.7 billion Kaduna State contract.

At the heart of the dispute is an eight-kilometre road in Zaria, a stretch that has sparked more political friction than traffic relief. The road, awarded under the El-Rufai administration for N17.2 billion, saw a reported N8 billion paid out for what state officials now claim was only 30% completion. Cue accusations. Cue probes. Cue a swirl of headlines around the son of Pastor Enoch Adeboye, General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

But here’s the twist. According to court filings and contract records, Deolu wasn’t even on the board of Ronchess when the deal was inked in 2020. He became Chairman in April 2021, four months after the project’s supposed completion deadline. The road, meanwhile, remains a tarmac of contention.

As is often the case in Nigeria’s overlapping orbits of faith, business, and politics, facts tend to ride shotgun to innuendo. Yet the courts, for now, have offered a pause.

Financial accounts frozen in the heat of inquiry have been thawed. Oral summons from law enforcement have been ruled unconstitutional. And Deolu? Still shepherding his RCCG ministry, still managing The Wise Men fashion brand, and now, unwillingly, the protagonist of a state-level infrastructure whodunit.

For the Kaduna Assembly and the nation watching, the question remains: who really owns the mess in Zaria—and who’s just standing on the wrong part of the road?