Uganda President Yoweri Museveni recent decision to sack his long-term confidant and ally Amama Mbabazi from the position of prime minister, was a big meal for the Uganda media and got tongues in the region wagging.

To many, it was the final signal that Museveni is definitely going for an unprecedented seventh term as president (two of them unelected), and doesn’t want anyone near him casting a green eye on his throne.

Yet, that is not the bigger story. What has happened in Uganda was a very East African affair, and also told us that Ethiopia, is a very different country in the wider East African region.

Let’s explain. If you take the second multiparty era in Africa to have started from 1990, there is no country in this region where the vice president or prime minister has succeeded the president in an internal party succession, and then gone to be chief executive through a competitive election, except in Ethiopia.

Hailemariam Desalegn was deputy to the dominant Meles Zenawi, and took over when the big man died in August 2012. He will probably win next year’s election.

In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta died in the same month as Meles, August 1978, and his deputy Daniel arap Moi took over. But that was during the one-party age.

Tanzania, often considered to have the region’s most “stable” politics, has not been any different. Ali Hassan Mwinyi, who took office in November 1985 was, as First Vice President, deputy to the revered Julius Nyerere.

One-party era

But that too was in one-party times.

Of course this is not an East African reality, it is a general African one. It also points to a failing in how political transitions in the region are understood.

A lot of emphasis is put on what happens at a general election. It should be on intraparty democracy and leadership change.

When a political party is sufficiently institutionalised, and its members have power, they will elect their presidential candidate and his or her deputy. If they win an election as president and deputy, if that power balance remains, the president cannot easily sack his VP or Prime Minister.

But where power is personalised power, and party members are little more than puppets, the president will all but handpick his deputy, and get the members to endorse his choice. The VP or PM then serves at his whim.

If party members don’t have power over their president, though he might run an efficient government, there will be a trade off — they will not have power over him as private citizens either and he can be corrupt, curtail democratic freedoms, and be arbitrary, if he chose to and they wouldn’t be able to censure him.

But mostly, while he and his government can hold on to power, their rule will be incompetent. However powerful and solid they might appear, they will still be scarecrows in the rice garden. They can frighten away the birds, yes, but they will still be empty coats hanging on a cross.

And as a result, the end of their rule will be messy. There will not be an Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Front to knock heads and ensure an orderly transition.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter: @cobbo3