A popular Nigerian cleric, Johnson Suleman, has stirred a controversy by saying oral sex by a man and his wife is not a sin.
Mr Suleman, who is the general overseer of Omega Fire Ministries International, spoke during a church service.
The church is headquartered in Edo State, Nigeria’s South-south.
The church was conducting a question-and-answer session at the time he made the remarks.
It is unclear when the church service was held.
But a video clip which showed the cleric making the remarks at the church was uploaded on YouTube on 22 August 2025.
‘Oral sex not a sin’
At the church service, a woman, who appeared to be in her 50s, was seen reading out a question from a jotter.
“Daddy, Sir, is oral sex a sin?” the woman asked Mr Suleman, often called “Daddy” by church members.
Some church members were heard murmuring while the cleric himself chuckled.
“Should I answer from the Bible?” Mr Suleman asked a crowd of worshippers who encouraged him to “talk.”
“Anything you do with your wife indoors is not a sin. So long as she’s your wife and both of you agree to do it, (it is not a sin),” he said.
Some worshippers murmured over the response by the cleric.
“I can show you (from the Bible). When the Bible was talking about the wife of your youth, it was talking about ‘go within thy walls, let thy hands pass through her cisterns.’
“What do you think the Bible was saying? So long as it is not fetish, a ritual, it is not diabolic, (it is not a sin),” Mr Suleman further argued.
The cleric dismissed arguments by some Christians who argue that oral sex is sinful because it involves mouths used to offer prayers and praises to God.
“Don’t you use the same mouth to gossip? Don’t you use the same mouth to tell lies?” he asked rhetorically in Pidgin English language.
‘I’ll be criticised on these comments’
Mr Suleman later predicted that many would criticise him over the remarks, but added that he was unperturbed.
“Save your home, save your home,” he told the worshippers, suggesting couples should not refuse a request by their spouse for oral sex.
Is oral sex safe?
Also called orogenital sex, oral sex involves using the mouth, lips, or tongue to stimulate a partner’s genitals or anus.
But the practice is dangerous, according to health experts.
“Oral sex has been linked with an increased risk of acquiring Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) infection in the mouth and with an increased risk of developing oral cancers that are caused by HPV,” Adegboyega Fawole, a gynaecologist, said in 2017.
Mr Fawole, a professor, at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital said the virus caused almost all cases of cervical cancer and could cause genital warts and anal cancer.
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Like Mr Fawole, Bamidele Mutiu, a consultant microbiologist at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, stressed that oral sex is dangerous because organisms that cause sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are usually alive in the saliva.
“The fluid and secretion from the genitals can contain organisms that cause STDs, which are alive and are not killed by the saliva,” Mr Mutiu told Punch newspaper in 2021.