Powering Kampala’s fastest growing service industry, the million mini-prophets have given employment to hundreds who handle the sports bets – sorry prophecies – and the sector is rapidly spreading to the countryside.
In fact it is difficult to find any trading centre in the country that doesn’t have a sports prophecy dealership.
And they are very technology compliant. Soon there will be no more pieces of paper, as many dealerships are now handling the sports prophecies online.
I think they should be praised for being environmentally friendly as trees will no longer have to die to produce so much paper that the million prophets have been using to foretell Man U’s recovery and Arsenal’s next player transfer deal.
Welcome to Uganda, the land of a million prophets. Unlike in the olden days when a new prophet would come up a hundred years after the last one passed away, in Uganda we get a hundred new prophets every year.
And those are the big ones. We shall talk about the mini-prophets later.
What has made the science of prophecy in Uganda rather rampant is the elevation of predictions to prophecies.
Ideally, a prediction is made by using available data to project how a scheduled event will turn out.
For example, if two candidates are facing off in an election, you can predict that Candidate A will win with a majority of so many percentage points.
However, in Uganda that has been elevated to a prophecy. And so whoever can wave the Bible and make a right prediction is called, or calls himself, a prophet.
What is nice about it is that women are also claiming a significant role in this growing sector of prophecy
, although I don’t like the way they feminise the title and call themselves ‘Prophetess’.
One famous prophetess used to wear only trousers and stockings and nobody ever saw her legs, leading speculation that she had the lower limbs of a goat.
