After getting life eligibility, now we want life presidency

In 2021, Ashraf Rahim Bisiika will be eligible to be president of Uganda. As at January 2021, he will be a few months shy to make 19 and, Insh’Alhah, he will have sorted high school.
Today, Ashraf began the first term of Senior Four. And for his passage to ‘maturity’, he included perfume and deodorant on his shopping list. I paid.
Make no mistake; I would support Ashraf if he were to challenge Mr Museveni. That is the political reality in Uganda. Trouble with Ashraf’s candidature in 2021 is that eligibility is different from winning a presidential election. Mr Museveni, who has participated in six elections, can testify on this. That’s why he always put a caveat on all the elections: ‘If we lose, we will go to the bush’.

That is why Mr Museveni’s ‘life eligibility’ (running for office till death) should not be mistaken for life presidency (ruling till death). He could lose an election. And the cost of electoral campaigns is becoming high on his physical body and resources (even if he seems to have access to unending resources).
We, Mr Museveni’s woligwa wendigwa (fanatical supporters), are not stupid. We also know that eligibility is not enough and that Mr Museveni cannot win a presidential election fair and square (our work in Parliament is a testimony). That is why we are devising new political matrices and logarithm to keep our main man in power.

Now that ‘life eligibility’ is in the bag, we are now considering life presidency. How do we get this without scandalising Ugandans? We are considering to set up a Constitutional Review Commission or and support a National Dialogue.
What we seek in the Constitutional Review Commission or in the National Dialogue is the adoption of the Bidandi Ssali Doctrine (aka Parliamentary System). This is the system where the leader of the party that wins the majority parliamentary seats forms a government.
With that system, we (Museveni’s woligwa wendigwa) would avoid exposing our Dear Leader to the punishing demands of election campaigns; be they physical and resources.

As party leader and sitting president, Dear Leader would have to do ‘something’ because the victory of party MPs is what would make him President. That’s to say, even if the party doesn’t get majority seats (do you remember 1980?), he would have to do something nyabula…
That means most of the national politics would take place in political parties to wit: to be president and head of state, one would have to first be a party leader. For older Ugandans, this was the electoral system until 1996 (we discount the 1989 expansion of the NRC).

When Bindandi Ssali proposed the Parliamentary System, he wanted the party to have some control over the party leaders or president. But now, we are going to use it to avoid exposing our Dear Leader to an angry population. And with that system, we will (and are expected to) always return Mr him as the party leader. We have life eligibility, we now want life presidency. And one of the ways to have life presidency (yet remain masquerading as democrats) is to adopt that Parliamentary Electoral System.

The question now is: Where do we get that constitutional change with minimum hustle? Should we use a Constitutional Review Commission or a National Dialogue?
The National Dialogue has an informal aura to it, yet its characterisation as some kind of Constituent Assembly carries popular weight. Plus: we would like to appease the religious leaders, whose idea the National Dialogue is. So, in fighting the NRM rebel MPs, Ms Ruth Nankabirwa is fighting the wrong war; a war whose victory has no strategic dividends.

Mr Bisiika is the executive editor of East African Flagpost.