Besigye’s pressure group will struggle to push the regime out

For groups and individuals bent on achieving something in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges, patience, perseverance and persistence often work wonders.

But sometimes the challenges are so daunting that even when you have tonnes of patience, perseverance and persistence, like Dr Kizza Besigye, you will have a hard time making progress, or you will end up failing completely.
Dr Besigye and millions of others — voters mainly — have done all that is humanly possible to tilt the balance of state power, but they have so far made zero progress. 

Dr Besigye’s new pressure group, the People’s Front for Transition (PFT), the latest in a series, is meant to galvanise the Opposition and Ugandans into action and ensure change of government.

The problem is that there is only one constitutional means of securing power in Uganda.  A presidential candidate contests an election, and if they win, they become president. In theory, it is all too easy if a candidate is popular; in practice, it is next to impossible on the  current set up.

Dr Besigye knows this only too well and has harped on it in his speeches and social media posts. That means that the PFT has only one viable (but not entirely lawful) option of changing government: organising popular protests and rallies across the country.
So Dr Besigye can appear on a radio/TV news and current affairs show and criticise the government, but he and other politicians behind the PFT will not be allowed to address rallies. 

If they remain defiant and manage to mobilise Ugandans to attend rallies or to take part in protests, but security forces will use brute force, as they have previously done, to quell the protests. There will be regrettable deaths.

The Opposition will be back to square one. And the real losers will be families and friends of those killed in protests.
But the Opposition needs to know this: For every Ugandan who wields a position of power and is leading a comfortable life, there are dozens of people who are happy with the current administration because they benefit.

The ruling regime, therefore, remains unpopular among Opposition politicians and Ugandans who have had little or nothing to gain from their rule. The problem with this category is that it is powerless. You could argue that it has power in form of votes, but the regime knows how to effectively neutralise that power.

The category that wields power is made of security forces, and they appear to be still loyal to the ruling party. 
If the Opposition had a way of making them disloyal, we would be very close to seeing change

Mr Namiti is a journalist and former
Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
[email protected]    @kazbuk