East Africa is entering a stormy political season with two presidents set to face elections in the next three years — Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza (2015) and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni (2016) — and Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta set to shepherd their countries into elections in 2017.

In neighbouring South Sudan, President Salva Kiir is expected to face the first General Election since independence scheduled in 2015, although he recently hinted at possible delays.

Legally, President Nkurunziza is serving his last term, but he is in the process of delivering a new constitutional framework. The region will be watching to see if he will hand over power constitutionally.

In Uganda, last week, President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement unanimously proposed the leader for another term. This is the first time, after a lot of dithering and throwing out of hints, that the Movement has come out unequivocally to say it favours another term for the long-serving leader.

READ: Museveni: I will not be forced out easily
Kampala dispensed with restrictions to presidential term limits nearly 10 years ago, and it seems Museveni could rule for life.

In recent days, Museveni has moved to crush growing internal opposition from mainly old hands to his stranglehold on power, both within his ruling party and the country at large.

Last week, during an annual retreat of his party’s lawmakers, a young legislator drove a resolution that seeks to reserve the position of the party’s flag bearer in the 2016 elections for him.

This is in spite of the fact that such an action runs counter to the party’s constitution that gives the responsibility of determining the party’s presidential candidate to the national delegates conference, its supreme organ.

The resolution appeared to target Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi, the ruling party’s secretary general, and Speaker of parliament Rebecca Kadaga — two senior party members around whom rumours of presidential aspirations have been swirling. Both have stated they would give the presidency a shot if the party endorsed them.

READ: How NRM legislators plotted Museveni’s 2016 bid

The rumours about the two intensified following admissions by major opposition leaders that Museveni remained impossible to defeat in the next election in the absence of comprehensive electoral reforms.

Museveni’s move appears to be a continuation of his strategy of reinventing himself around a new generation of Ugandans, who comprise close to 80 per cent of the country’s population and have never known any other president.

READ: Museveni drops the last of the ‘historicals’

What this means politically, is that his restoration of security, peace and stability — his key campaign issues — are unlikely to wash with a demographic that constitutes the majority voting block but that has always known these conditions to exist. Co-option was therefore in order.

Museveni’s started reinventing himself last year first by weeding out the army of old guards. Then he followed it up with a Cabinet reshuffle that introduced young ministers like Frank Tumwebaze and Richard Todwong, who are associated with his 2016 re-election project.

On February 6, he shuffled his army of 112 Resident District Commissioners. He cast aside mostly old people and replaced them with young blood. The next area to watch is the looming Cabinet changes where he is expected to complete the replacement of the old with the young.

It is unlikely that Mbabazi, long known to be Museveni’s blue-eyed boy, who ordinarily would execute the task assigned to the young Turks, will go out without a fight.

Indeed, although he supported the motion, Mbabazi reportedly said, “It will be forwarded to the appropriate party organs whose duty it is to choose a presidential flag bearer.”

In the coming months, the party’s 550-member national executive council (NEC) will convene to weigh in on the MPs’ resolution as part of its mandate to the national delegates conference.

Mbabazi is reported to enjoy considerable support within the NEC. For instance, in a 2012 meeting, up to 200 members reportedly backed him to remain both Prime Minister and secretary general of the party, in spite of demands from Museveni and other senior party officials that he relinquish one post or the other.

Moreover, the party constitution backs any member who meets national legal requirements to challenge for any position in the party.

It prescribes primaries for every elective national and local government office and reserves for the national delegates conference the task to determine the party’s presidential candidate.

Tinkering with these party provisions in the past, such as appears underway now, nearly cost Museveni a nomination in 2010, at least on NRM’s ticket.

In that year, the little known Capt (Rtd) Ruhinda Maguru dashed to the courts when the 22-member central executive committee (CEC), which runs the party, quashed his bid to challenge Museveni, whom it instead unanimously nominated as flag bearer.

Although the CEC is mandated to assess people seeking nominations for all top party offices, including presidential flag bearer, before the NEC has a chance to look at them, Mr Maguru argued it had not supplied sufficient reasons explaining why it had blocked him.

The case ended with a consent judgment in favour of Museveni, who has yet to meet the five key issues they agreed upon. Mr Maguru says they are watching.

“The consent judgement we got is a public document. It belongs to all people. Anybody can use it. But more so, it is more important to NRM members and more critically to the NRM delegates who have the mandate to determine how they elect the flag bearer,” Mr Maguru said.

In Rwanda, although the succession debate has cooled off, it is still not clear if President Paul Kagame will be open to a change to the Constitution to allow him a third term. However, his recent remarks are suggestive.

There is not a single country on earth that has a constitution that has not changed one aspect or the other. Whether I’m going or not should not preoccupy people. Times passes and we will come to know what will happen,” Kagame said in a television interview with NTV, a Kenyan station run by the Nation Media Group.

READ: Constitutions do not fall from heaven, they are made by people

Rwanda goes to the polls in 2017, after every other country in the region.

For Kenya, the ongoing cases at the International Criminal Court (ICC) against President Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto could well shape the outcome of the 2017 election.

So, will these men let go when their time comes? The bets are off in the region’s succession stakes.

In South Sudan, a new constitution and the 2015 election are at the centre of the ongoing conflict that broke out mid December.

The country is working with an interim constitution, which came into force after the election of President Salva Kiir in 2010, but which was to last for only four years and be replaced by a more representative constitution before the election in 2015.

The interim constitution that governed the South as a semi-autonomous entity makes the president of South Sudan one of the most powerful in Africa.

The president cannot be impeached by parliament and has the power to prorogue the parliament of any of the 10 states, sack the governor and call for elections within three months.

It is instructive that the latest survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) shows democracy is at a standstill in the region, noting that there was neither significant progress nor regression in democracy last year.

The report, Democracy Index, which is based on 2012 data, ranks Tanzania as the most democratic country in East Africa followed by Uganda, Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda in that order.

Burundi tense

The democracy index is based on five categories: Electoral processes and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation and political culture.

The EIU ranks Tanzania as number 81 on the democracy index with an overall score of 5.88 points out of a possible 10 points. Uganda is at number 94 with 5.16 points, Kenya is at position 104 with 4.71 points, Burundi is at position 125 with 3.6 points and Rwanda is at position 132 with 3.36 points.

In Bujumbura, known to play catch-up in the region, the government’s insistence on revising the Constitution has sparked fears that President Nkurunziza is bent on securing a third term. He is serving his last term, which ends in June 2015. If everything holds, the country should see a new president. But it appears nothing will hold.

Tinkering with the Constitution in Burundi already appears underway and it is particularly worrying, warn analysts. For one, it will effectively nullify the power-sharing system agreed in Arusha, Tanzania. This deal between the country’s dominant ethnic groups has underwritten the stability it has enjoyed over the past 13 years.

READ: What will be the effect of the political falling out in Burundi?

There are fears it risks regressing into the deadly ethnic violence that bedevilled it before.

In spite of the political opposition’s weaknesses, opposition against these manoeuvres has galvanised to include even the Catholic Church, which is known to be highly influential. Yet Nkurunziza remains bullish.

Without a serious challenger in the party and with a large majority in both houses of parliament, all that stands between him and a third term is himself.

Amukowa Anangwe, a political science lecturer at the University of Dodoma, said democracy is yet to take root in the region.

Ruling parties, he said are keen to take advantage of incumbency to perpetuate flawed electoral process through the use of state resources, security forces and flagrant stuffing of ballot boxes.

Additional reporting by Fred Oluoch and Berna Namata