We will now tell you the entire D Reign Testimony as told at his 4th March concert at Garden City Rooftops. Our thoughts after this show were D Reign has raised the standard so high. Whereas all the elements of a great concert were experienced, he made a deliberate effort to minister. Also, because it seemed that he had set the tone and direction for the concert, every musician who performed, including Ruyonga, Canaan Gents, Justine Nabbosa, Brian Lubega, Lyrical Mycheal, Samantha Ocero, and Reborn Status, all made an effort to minister. Some shared their testimonies, whereas others delivered powerful performances. The only musician who gave the concert a love-theme was Afrie who gave a passionate delivery of Askari. Paul Selah did a great job of getting the crowd hyped.
Amidst extreme excitement, D Reign was invited, he stepped onto the stage to sing a few choruses. The atmosphere was ethereal. Many things were still uncertain. How would the show progress? Was it a worship concert? A testimony kind of thing? Or, an edgy one, infused with high energy? D Reign, as if listening to our thoughts, told us that this show would be nothing like we had seen before. His name is short-form for “Destined To Reign.” Later, we would listen to his powerful testimony, see him operate in the anointing as he called the unsaved to give their lives to Jesus, prayed for the sick to receive healing and then switch it up to a dance-party at the end.
We promised to transcribe his testimony for you to read, if you missed the show, or relieve – if you attended but would like to go through it again.
As you already know, Dalton Nyesigomwe aka D Reign was a drug addict. How did that happen for one who was apparently raised in a Christian home? He said, going to church every Sunday does not guarantee going to heaven. “I went to church, got confirmed, and knew all these things but did not have a relationship with God.”
“When my mum went to Winchester, she came back with a piano. I started learning how to play piano when I was like 8 years old. Now, when I went to high-school, in Senior one and Two, I wanted to become a star. I wanted to become famous, but you see…. this stage is not about fame. In the world, it is about fame. I had even got myself better shoes than these ones (he directed the crowd’s attention to his shoes) but God told me, “No! I don’t want you to distract my people.”” There was laughter at this point. He continued to say, “By the time we leave this place, I want us to be real because, I (personally) lived a lie.”
“When I was in Senior four, I used to watch these artistes on Tv. That time, Channel 5 had just come. I would see them steal money in their videos and I would see them driving nice cars and in my heart, I said, “I want to be like that.””
“The first song I recorded was called ‘cruising to the club, in my nice car, with all my girls seated in the back seat.’ That is the picture I thought life was. I remember in S. 2, I went on the internet and started searching ‘Illuminati.’”
A friend of his had told him, “D Reign, you are wasting a lot time. When you go to Illuminati, they quicken the whole thing.” That is how his attempt to join the secret group started.
When D Reign asked this friend how he could join the Illuminati, he was told, “Go to your bedroom. Get three candles. Make a triangle and sit in the middle.” Apparently, at 3 am he would be visited by a devilish being. According to D Reign, the only thing he saw that night when he attempted the ritual were the mosquitoes. The crowd burst out in laughter again. “I waited for the devil to come but he did not show up,” D Reign continued.
“This is what I was forgetting. The Bible says we were born dead. Because of one man (Adam), the Bible says, we all fell. And, because of another man (Jesus) we are all made righteous. I did not know the person I was looking for – the devil, was already working in me. “I went back to school and told him, “You man! Your thing did not work.” My friend is a prominent artiste right now, he is doing good. I will not share his name…. because I am praying for him.”
“I remember, one night I had a dream, and in this dream I was standing in a corridor. In the corridor, there were children singing in the left and on the right. They were singing a very beautiful song. I remember seeing someone standing in front of me with a shadow. So, I approach him and I wanted him to see me. He told me, “You cannot see me and live.” I told him, “I Can see you and live.” I remember him turning around and that is the last thing I saw.
I woke up but with so much fear in me, but the song stuck in my head.” D Reign went to school, narrated the story to a friend. He later recorded and sold the song to a Telecom company. The money he was paid was used to go on a shopping spree. He was in his Senior two when this happened. Upon the realization that it felt good to be rich, he joined a studio in Mengo and produced his own song titled, Kirira, Yambuka, which he performed at weddings. It was, according to him, a very easy to sing-along to kind of song.
Around this time, he tasted alcohol for the first time. It got him ‘high.’ He had never experienced this before. “I saw things in a different way.” Apparently, his esteem increased every time he drank alcohol. He could easily speak to people and felt he was more creative when drunk. From that time, he never looked back.
“A ‘height’ is not high enough until it is a ‘height’ enough,” this D reign said to imply, he kept craving for more ‘highs.’ He said that, “God is the Most High,” because, “however high you are, God is still higher than you and still, He remains sober. The Bible says,” D Reign paraphrased, “Do not be drunk with wine but we drunk with the Holy Ghost.”
When D Reign’s parents asked him what he wanted to become, he responded that he wanted to pursue a career in music as a musician and producer. They were supportive. He went and joined a popular studio which he declined to name, and here, things got worse.
“I started tasting drugs that I had never seen.” He did all of this in the name of being famous. He told us that he produced the then famous, ‘Whistle Song’ by The Locomotives, a group of mainstream musicians.
D Reign at The Testimony Concert at Garden City Rooftops
“After that, I went to Dubai.” His parents had supported him to study Sound Engineering. He met a Nigerian called, Supersonic Blaze who had scars allover his body. D Reign did not desire to associate with the gentleman at first sight. Funny enough though, two weeks down the road Supersonic Blaze was his room-mate. “This guy starts telling me about juju (witchcraft). I was like, You Nigerians with your things!” D Reign recalls numerous times when the guy ran out of money while they were in a club at night. He would excuse himself and return with dollars. D Reign concluded that Supersonic Blaze could have simply stolen this money.
As much as D Reign was told that God was the answer to everything, as a child, he did not fully believe in God. He said that some people, on top of this, make the mistake of loving God for what He can give. He said, “When you start understanding God, it no longer becomes about what He can give because His very own presence overshadows even what He has. The promised land was God. He took the children from Egypt to the promised land, but Moses said, I shall not go if your presence does not go with us, because God is the promised land.”
One day, his Nigerian room-mate returned looking for his special ring which he wore everywhere he went. The ring, although D reign did not believe, apparently gave Supersonic Blaze everything he wanted.
“That morning, I opened the Bible and started praying.” This Bible had been put in his luggage by his mother, perhaps even by mistake. “The Bible says that while we were still sinners Christ came and died for us. Even so, while I was still in my ignorance Christ was working on me.” This ring had disappeared as he prayed. His roommate turned violent as he demanded that D reign produced his lost ring. What happened there felt like a real-life movie involving Supersonic Blaze lifting and tossing him to the wall of their room. “I wish someone had recorded that. It was going to get a million likes on Youtube.”
After this encounter, he called his mother and told her, “Mother, I am dying!” His now violent roommate had walked out and D reign was left weak and unable to do anything. He was advised to get his belongings and run out of the house. He did not give it a second thought, in fact, he did not even pick any single belonging of his. He ran to Abu Dhabi and spent three day there.
“I ran mad. How do I know I ran mad? It is because I was naked and I thought that the people that had clothes were the ones that were mad.” Everyone he bypassed looked at him with pity. He too pitied them because he thought they were mad. He was walking naked on the streets. His father was called and told that his son was out of control. His father got on the next flight he could get, told D Reign they needed to go back to Kampala and re-strategize before he could return to Dubai.
Upon arrival, he was on high demand because he had obtained certain skills in production. He started receiving offers from people who wanted him to work for them as a music producer. He convinced himself that he was in the right mind to start working again. He accepted an offer from one studio and started working there. Things got worse because, unlike in the past, he was getting enough cash-flow on the daily and could afford all kinds of drugs and alcohol at liberty. “In a day, I would get like 3 clients…Each client would bring about three hundred thousand Uganda shillings.” He was pending all his time in studio, sleeping there and would spend up to a week without changing clothes. Artistes knew that, for D Reign to produce for you, all you needed to carry was a bottle of alcohol and all would be okay.
“I produced hit after hit. Tell your neighbor, “Hit after hit.”” The crowd echoed the phrase. He was now popular at night clubs for his production. “People would see me on the outside and think, that guy is living the life. Honestly speaking, the D reign you see here now, is the D reign on the inside.” There was a thunderous hand-clap before D Reign continued to say he pitied those who envied him because of the life he was living. He was a slave to his addiction. Whereas he kept producing many hit songs and had won the envy of many, D Reign said that, “We all have dreams. But, If the end result of that dream is not God, it will leave you empty. I wanted to be on the billboards. I wanted people to listen to my music. I wanted people to see me.” He had gained popularity as a producer in Uganda, and neighboring Rwanda and Kenya from producing music for musicians. His travels to these countries were highly anticipated by key industry leaders, also, because they had opened a branch of their studio (he did not mention its name) in these countries.
He had celebrity status. He said, “The truth is, when you are going to die, you know.”
“It is like how, when you are sick, you know you are sick but nobody else knows that you are sick. They do not feel the same way you feel. You are in it alone. It started feeling like I was leaving the world – like I was literally being separated from the world. People would be in a room talking and I would be so far away.” At this point he was estranged to his family, because in his own reasoning, they could not give him anything. He was capable of doing that for himself. He was alone. This feeling was shared by all the people at Garden City Rooftops. Everyone was listening intently. Then D Reign added, “I am coming to the Good News.” This too brought a glow in many people’s faces. They wanted to know how God changed this story. We were all at the edge of our seats.
“I had a reached a place where, the alcohol was not making me high but it was making me sober. (This was) because, every time I had not taken it, I would run mad. There is no one who is truly addicted. The question is, what are they looking for? The root-cause of an addiction is satisfaction. That is why, the solution to an addiction is finding satisfaction in Christ Jesus.”
“When I started coming to the end of my life – the Bible says we are new creatures – I started looking for God.” Speaking more emphatically, he said, “You guys, I looked for God!”
“My mum is my witness. I would open scripture, the whole night…crying! Telling God, I want out. Enough is enough, I am done. And nothing was happening. I looked for God… I looked for God…” He then recalled something that happened and told us, that one day, after returning from a show in Entebbe (in Uganda) with some artistes, he started shaking profusely. Again, he thought he would die. He called his mother and told her that he was going to die. His mother had had enough. She told him, “You die.” This is because every phone call seemed to take on this same message of death. At this point, he wanted to give his life to Jesus Christ. His mother told him to rest and they do this later, but he could not wait any longer. They went to church and he gave his life to Jesus. There was another shout of victory and praise to God.
Even then, that was not the end. He went back home. “That night so much happened in a dream that The Holy Spirit is still interpreting to me even now.” Upon giving his life to Jesus, he went to the streets and started preaching to those he met. The zeal of God had consumed him. He knew no scripture but wanted to preach. Accidentally, he collided with a parked motorcycle (boda boda) that fell on the one next to it, leading to a ripple effect and the falling down of all motorcycles that were packed within centimeters of each other. The owners were not going to take this lightly as they pounced on him, beat him up and threw him in the trenches.
After regaining his strength, he got a boda boda to take him to church. Upon reaching there, he gave away his phone as payment for the fare since he did not have any money on him. An overnight prayer meeting was happening at the church but, he got an overwhelming feeling of being filthy. He saw what seemed to be two worlds in that moment – the songs being sung in church and angelic beings around the church. He was convicted to enter the church. When he did, he got slain, intense prayer of deliverance and casting out of demons took place from 10:00pm in the night to 10:00 am in the morning and was then picked by his mother.
“We don’t sing music to make money. God brought us from far.” The funny thing is, after all of this, he returned to the club the following Monday. “But you know, if something has changed on the inside of you, it is just a matter of time.” His final walk away from his addiction involved calling an aunt who abandoned whatever she was doing to come and rescue him from a state of feeling like he was about to die, again. He was taken to rehab. He got out of it, but at a Teen Challenge program, that is where his healing happened.
The rest is history.
As you can tell, we have tried to share everything as promised.
Feel free to share this testimony with all the people in your circles.
Ug Gospel Life 