The dreaded Public Order Management Bill was finally passed by Uganda’s parliament last week. The Bill gives President Yoweri Museveni’s government wide-ranging powers to restrict free speech, freedom of assembly, and kill off political dissent if it chooses to.

According to the Bill, any gathering can be considered a protest if it consists of more than three people, be it in public or private, as long as there is a possibility that they will discuss politics. So, essentially, more than three democracy activists or opposition politicians cannot meet for lunch without applying for a police permit a week in advance.

If the police have not given them permission, they can be arrested over their steak. And if they resist, the Bill gives police authority to use deadly force to beat them down. Appropriately, the Bill has been abbreviated as POM, giving it a similar ring to Poom, Boom, and other violent sounds.

Yet, horrible as the Bill is, POM also represents a Kafkaesque progress of sorts by the Kampala regime.

To begin with, in the past 15 years, the Uganda government has often behaved like a bandit regime that is bound by no law.

It has seized suspects released by court, and spirited them off to unknown places. It has deployed shadowy paramilitary forces with names like Black Mamba to lay siege to courts. It had one called Kalangala Action Plan, led by a drum-beating portly major, which would break up protests with whips.

Many times, opposition politician Dr Kizza Besigye was attacked and beaten like a snake. His car windows have been broken with hammers, and he has been blinded by pepper spray.

So, while POM is a bad Bill, it actually adopts less extreme methods than the police and security forces have used over the past 15 years. For example, it does not give them the right to hold people in the notorious “safe houses,” a cute name for torture dungeons.

With POM, therefore, the Uganda government is acting like an alcoholic who has finally gone to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Why now? One reason is that the arbitrariness and violence of the security forces was beginning to threaten the regime’s hold on power. In urban areas, their methods have radicalised the urban youth, who have developed military-style tactics for dealing with the police during protests.

The international cost to the government’s image had also become untenable. Because the actions were not defensible in law, it was left for various government and security to offer conflicting propagandistic excuses why excessive force and unreasonable restraints were being placed on opposition activities. POM is an attempt to give them a legal script to read from.

President Museveni has started his soft campaign for 2016, when he will be seeking a seventh term against the backdrop of a succession struggle in his ruling National Resistance Movement.

He will have to give some concessions, as he did last week with the south Buganda kingdom, to which the government restored property the state has been holding, just to prevent the country from going off the rails.

By trying to bring a degree of predictability and order into a jungle of high-handed policing, POM also reveals the fears and weaknesses of Kampala.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected]. Twitter: @cobbo3