The book “How To Fight Your Best Friend” has not yet been written. But the day it ever gets launched, there will be a stampede for it in Kampala, easily the city with the lowest number of bookshops per capita in the world.

Fighting an enemy has never been too complicated; you find the quickest way to take him out. Fighting your best friend of long standing who refuses to join the enemy ranks is another matter.

If you tackle him like you would an enemy, it is bound to scare the rest of your lesser friends off as nobody will feel safe with you any more.

That is the dilemma facing Uganda’s ruling party whose Secretary General, Amama Mbabazi, is suspected of eyeing the national presidency, a job that his party chairman, Yoweri Museveni, holds and still wants.

The SG swears that he would never challenge his one and beloved chairman, but his declaration that he is a ‘“disciplined cadre” who would never do such a thing hasn’t laid the matter to rest, with some party youth going around promoting his candidature.

The SG is also the country’s prime minister and won’t relinquish either of the jobs, just like the president who also remains chairman of the party.

Calling a party delegates’ conference to replace the SG can be tricky as it is suspected majority of the delegates support him and could even urge him to go for the chairmanship.

So instead, a caucus of ruling party MPs was called and they endorsed the president-cum-chairman as their sole candidate for the presidency come 2016.

However the caucus does not have the mandate to pick the candidate and so plans were made to send the MPs out to the constituencies to sell the caucus resolution.

The following day however, the chairman and the SG publicly re-affirmed their solid friendship so the MPs’ mission was called off. Then a meeting of the party executive committee sat and criticised the caucus endorsement of the chairman’s sole candidature.

So the MPs mission to the constituencies was reinstated, and big monies budgeted for it. Then parliament realised that if most MPs take off to campaign for the chairman’s candidacy there will be no business in the house.

So the mission was called off again. Then it transpires the SG’s wife was not party to the attestation of solid friendship between her husband and the president, and a block-buster interview she gives the weekend media indicates all is not well in the party.

In an apparently unrelated development, the MPs’ mission is reported to be on again. Each MP requires one Ush150 million for the job, an amount suspected to correspond to what on average MP requires to pay off their perennial debts, which keep many of them constantly on the run from money lenders.

As the MPs’ mission gets called on and off, in comes advanced electronic eavesdropping.

Links to the Internet Dropbox suddenly appear and what do we have uploaded there? Voice recordings discussing espionage and counter espionage between the friendly camps of SG and chairman.

But everything has an end, and this game has a deadline — November 2015 — when NRM must pick ONE candidate of the two friends. Or someone else.

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for development journalism. E-mail: [email protected]