Oil exploration; an educated guess that coincided with divine destiny 

Theirs was a love story crafted in the stars. Oh so it seemed. Peter and Jane grew up in the same neighborhood.

The families were close friends, went to the same schools, were the best couple during their prom, made it through university and begun their ascent into the corporate world. Everything suggested that the two were destined to become one.

Besides a few glamour-pusses that hoped to catch Peter’s eye, dudes that lurked around Jane, and a distant uncle that demanded a golden goose before giving Jane his blessings in marriage, there was pretty little destruction. But a couple of years into their happily thereafter, they separated due to the commonest cause of divorce in the world, “irreconcilable differences”.

Such is life on both an individual and collective level. Many of our decisions are based on “educated” guesses. From the schools we choose for our children, the courses they opt for at university, the career path they take and the spouses we end up with. But because these are guesses, no one can’t guarantee a given outcome with a 100 per cent certainty. We hit some and miss some.

Similarly, the government’s stubborn stance to soldier on with the exploration of the country oil resources, in spite incessant international pressure to drop the project, is an educated guess reached after considering opinions from various subject matter experts.

The most recent of milestones towards the eventual goal of oil output in 2025, was the commissioning of the first oil drilling rigs along the shores of Lake Albert; the Kingfisher project area. The projected positive impact of oil production in Uganda is enormous especially if the resource is managed well.

An enviable case in point is Dubai whose transformation from a hardly habitable desert to the foremost tourist destination, many observers have attributed to the great leadership and management of its oil resource. As far as educated guesses go, Uganda’s oil exploration is a hit, and this has nothing to do with the aforementioned expected positives but rather its coincidental alignment to the divine destiny of the country.

At the peak of the debate in regard to the environmental consequences of the construction of the East Africa Crude Oil pipeline vis-à-vis the projected economic benefits, Prophet Elvis Mbonye pointed the key players to a January 03, 2017 prophecy in which God gave specific direction on the matter.

Firstly, he warned that if the nation tried to engage in things that were out of sync with those that would strike it, it would miss its opportune time. Delving into the prophecy, he revealed that; “While there was a tendency to move away; a global tendency to encourage other forms of energy besides oil, something will happen. There will somehow be a refocus back to oil and its value will shoot. And you will begin to see some of those so called new forms having flaws. It seems bad news for the environmentalists but the value of oil will increase.”

Eight months later, following years of protracted twists and turns there was a refocus back to oil with the signing of the EACOP project agreements and five years on, the $10 billion CNOOC & Total backed investment in the 1,440km crude oil pipeline from Uganda to Tanzania’s seaport of Tanga was concluded.

While this should draw a cheerful mix of high fives, pats on the back and a collective sigh of relief, it signifies that the government ought to give the more earnest heed to the divine than the empirical. The expert guesses can yield some good at times, but there’s a surer way that ought to be esteemed above all opinions.

For example, in August 2012 Prophet Mbonye warned against an imminent military operation to Somali to flash out the Al-Shabaab terrorists. He specifically revealed that he had seen Uganda military helicopters blowing up.

But against his divine counsel, the experts flew the helicopters to a detrimental end. The choppers crashed in the Mountain Kenya ranges leaving seven crew members dead.

As a nation we should not be relying on educated guesses when divine direction is an option. The empirical may make sense today, like it did in Peter and Jane’s case, but the divine leaps into the future and captures the end of a matter.

The author is a concerned citizen