[UAH] Succession: Suddenly, Uganda is up for grabs

As my Kenyan friends would say, "things are getting elephant" in Uganda.

The big story right now was kicked off by a letter written by Gen David "Tinyefuza" Sejusa, Uganda's Co-ordinator of Intelligence Services, who suggested that his boss, President Yoweri Museveni, was part of a secret plot to install his son, Brig Muhoozi Kainerugaba, as his successor.

He called for investigations into a plot to assassinate military officers and political leaders opposed to what he called "Project Muhoozi."

You don't do that in Gen Museveni's realm. Tinyefuza, who was still in London at the time of writing, in all probability will be detained upon his return.

Meanwhile, a few days earlier, the ruling National Resistance Movement did the one thing that its leaders, in the days when they ran Uganda as a one-party state, used to claim they despised most about traditional parties — it expelled four "rebel" MPs.

The MPs refused to toe the party line inside and outside parliament. Their "stubbornness" was seen as part of the many skirmishes in the scramble to succeed Museveni, who has now been in power for a record 27 years.

So how does an East African in Bujumbura, Nairobi, Kigali, or Dar es Salaam make sense of this dust storm in the Pearl of Africa?

Three things, really. First, last year, long-term Museveni rival Dr Kizza Besigye retired as leader of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), Uganda's main opposition party. Besigye is a purist, fastidious, uncompromising, and the NRM folks feared that he would be vengeful if he took power. He was the glue that kept the NRM united behind Museveni.

Besigye was replaced by former army commander and East African Legislative Assembly member Maj-Gen Mugisha Muntu, one of the most modest and mild-mannered men in Kampala.

With the Besigye bogey gone, the NRM's fear is gone too, and Mugisha now looks like a more suitable leader for a modern Uganda — for both the opposition and a few NRM members.

That has led to the next problem. The pretenders to the throne in the NRM seem to believe that the change of national dynamics caused by FDC's leadership change diminishes their chances of winning presidential elections in future. Their best chance is now, and that can only happen when "Mzee," as they call Museveni, vacates the chair.

Thirdly, we are seeing how polities without presidential term limits work. They were scrapped in Uganda in 2005. That, and the reality that the NRM is a military party, means the nation has no clear path to change of leadership. That has created too much unpredictability.

With these things, it helps people to calculate the risk of power changing through a coup, a stolen election, a fair poll, the patriarch anointing a successor (like in Saudi Arabia), or the country merely waiting for its ruler to age and die in his sleep, whereupon the courtier or one of his many wives in whose arms he died becomes the ruler.

It is the state of political limbo being created by not knowing the when, rather than the specific manner of how change will happen in Uganda when it does, that is breeding unease.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com. Twitter: @cobbo3

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