Voters line-up to cast their ballots during the last Presidential elections.

In a sign of how much diminished in stature he has become, it was important for President Yoweri Museveni to be shown on the front page of newspapers receiving the membership card of an aide to the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, Nandala Mafabi.
He forgot that last year two senior UPC party leaders, Badru Wegulo and Henry Mayega and former Kampala Mayor Nasser Sebaggala were wooed into the NRM. Former 1980s minister Chris Rwakasisi was released from Luzira Upper Prison and promptly inducted to Museveni’s election campaign.
These political figures were supposed to help swing public support in their various spheres of influence to the NRM. However, more than a year after the election and their crossing over, the Afrobarometer opinion poll had 74 per cent of the Ugandan public expressing dissatisfaction at the direction things are taking.
As it was in 1977 following the death of Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum, this Easter Sunday saw a chorus of leading clergymen separately call for the President to start working toward his exit from power.
Makerere University and other universities around the country have become hotbeds of anti-NRM sentiment and activism. All guild presidents at the major universities are today affiliated to the opposition.
Even the usually pro-Museveni European Union saw its ambassador in Kampala publicly express support for a return to presidential term limits, as a result of Museveni’s mismanagement.
So how the President imagined that against such rising national discontent and increasing concern from the international community, the symbolic defection of an aide to Mafabi constitutes a political victory, proves the point about a presidency that sadly has long past its peak of prestige and influence.
Restoring presidential term limits
The new effort led by civil society and leading clergymen, and now joined by the Parliament, is gaining steam to restore the two-term limit of presidential rule in Uganda.
The Rev. Zac Niringiye speaking at Makerere University on Thursday argued that most of today’s problems in Uganda are rooted in the absence of presidential term limits. As it is with most things in Uganda, the inability of the political, thinking and media class to understand the situation stands out as a major national weakness.
A number of callers into Kampala FM radio stations have correctly pointed out that as things stand out today, the crisis in Uganda can be traced to the particular fact of there being a man holding the office of President of the Republic of Uganda and that man is called Yoweri Museveni.
Rather than shape the campaign around the ousting of Museveni from power, which would be a major step in easing this particular national crisis, the campaigners are going in a roundabout way to stress the restoration of presidential term limits.
Knowing how cunning they are, State House will go along with the campaign and in 2016 simply argue that Museveni, if he wins, will start his first of two new terms in 2016 and step down in 2026.
Then around 2024, an effort using a bribed Parliament will start to remove term limits and, as happened in 2005, the limits will be removed. This is how it will come to pass that Museveni rules Uganda for 50 years and the nation is unable to do anything about it.
Iron-fisted national discipline needed
The misdirected campaign to restore limits on how long a President can hold that office takes me back to the long-standing problem of comprehension. Do Ugandans (do most people) understand what they read or hear or see?
Do people have the ability to know clearly and certainly what is going on?
As this writer stressed last week in an article on Uganda’s poor customer care, there is a problem rooted deep in Ugandan society that stands outside politics and political and military leaders. Democracy - meaning free and fair elections and equal access to election campaign resources by all parties and major candidates - will not solve it.What then can be done for Uganda?
Several things can be tried:
First, the society has to be taken through at least 10 years of iron discipline of the kind seen in North Korea. Rigid, stern, regimented discipline has to be drilled into Ugandans. They must be forced to do routine tasks that they would not normally wish to do.