He is arguably the most trending pastor in the country at the moment. He has likened himself to Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. He suddenly shot into the nation’s wholesome glare last Tuesday when he led an edition of FDC’s ongoing weekly prayers for the country. Perhaps he is the reason that edition of the opposition party’s weekly prayer sessions captured the imagination of the entire country.
What only a few know, however, is that Pastor Happy Daniel Ngabo isn’t exactly a new player on the country’s political scene. Before he led the weekly FDC prayers, Pastor Ngabo had spent some time speaking out against what he perceives as excesses of the regime, writing on his Facebook wall and voicing his sentiments at the pulpit.
The pastor who moved hearts at that Tuesday prayer session moved guns as an adolescent. As a child soldier, he was part of the NRA’s 1981-1986 guerrilla struggle which brought the current regime to power. This is a part of his profile the pastor readily gives anyone who cares to hear about his background. He claims he enjoyed President Museveni’s favour during the Bush War.
After the NRA rebel outfit captured power, young Happy Ngabo returned to school, studying at Katikamu Light College before joining Kyambogo University. His life, however, began to take a turn for the worse around that time as he soon became a total nuisance who lost himself to alcohol, women and all other vices. Ngabo says in this period he also lived largely as a crook, primarily trading illegally in gold and diamonds filched from Congo. Sometimes he practised petty theft to survive.
Then, it happened. Pastor Ngabo says it was while he sank deeper into self-annihilation, when one night, toward the turn of the millennium, Jesus appeared to him in person and turned his life around.
“No man preached to me,” the pastor says. “Jesus came and stood before me, without speaking a word but simply opening the Bible and showing me the scripture of Mathew 16, from verse 1. That scripture talks about the perverse generation that is looking for miracles but will be given none, rather only the sign of Jonah, and it was a message of my calling to be a vessel of revival in the church of my generation”.
Before he became a pastor with his own church, Ngabo spent some years as a roving evangelist until he founded Rock of Deliverance International Ministries in 2005, where he is lead pastor.
The pastor is married to Sandra K Ngabo, who is a fellow senior pastor at Rock of Deliverance International based at the church’s Dubai chapter, where she also runs a family trading business. The couple has several children.