As he passes on the baton of leadership of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region to Angola, the handover by Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni is creating jitters and uncertainty within some member countries.

Museveni is to relinquish the chair of the regional intergovernmental body, now in its 10th year, to his Angolan counterpart President José Eduardo dos Santos on January 15, when the latter hosts the region’s heads of state and government in his country’s capital Luanda.

With the focus on the promotion of peace, security, stability and development in the region, the body’s 5th Ordinary Summit will be dominated by the crisis in South Sudan, which joined in November 2012, the Central African Republic, and the fragile stability in DR Congo.

Museveni has a military presence in two of these countries.

On December 20, he deployed an unspecified number of soldiers and war assets to South Sudan following the eruption of a deadly political conflict five days earlier between the country’s President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Dr Riek Machar.

READ: Ugandans fear retaliatory rebel attacks after its troops enter Juba

Their real purpose there remains a subject of intense debate and a special parliamentary session on January 14.

Further chaos

In CAR, Uganda maintains some 3,000 soldiers who form part of the African Union Regional Task Force that is charged with hunting down Joseph Kony and his rebel Lord’s Resistance Army.

As the country slides further into chaos, Kampala is concerned the likelihood of a complete breakdown of law and order in Bangui coupled with the fighting in South Sudan could give a new lease of life to the notorious rebel leader, who is widely believed to be on his last legs, or create avenues for new rebellions.

Last year, the US National Intelligence Agency said Uganda risked violent instability in 2014.

Sources in ICGLR say Museveni has demonstrated a level of leadership and commitment quite unlike his Zambian predecessor and one his successor is unlikely to emulate, let alone surpass.

He convened eight extraordinary summits over his two-year term in an attempt to peacefully resolve the crisis in eastern DRC between Kinshasa and the M23 rebels.

A policy analyst associated with ICGLR told The EastAfrican, “The Angolan leadership has always been rather laidback. So the feeling is that Museveni has raised the bar pretty high.”

Luanda’s detachment is likely to cause the ICGLR to recede into the shadow of the Southern Africa Development Community, or South Africa to be more specific, which, in recent times, has appeared keen to project its power in the DR Congo — the heart of the Great Lakes Region.

This, observers say, has the potential to reignite tensions between SADC and the East African Community, which came to the fore in 2012 at the height of the conflict in eastern Congo.

In August of that year, SADC accused Rwanda of backing M23. It warned Kigali to immediately cease its interference or risk its intervention, as such actions threatened not only a member country but also the whole bloc.

SADC’s stance set back the diplomatic efforts of the ICGLR, as it raised the inevitability of a military confrontation pitting SADC states against EAC states, notably Rwanda and Uganda.

Non-military solution

Although Museveni calmed that storm, SADC still dominated the Force Intervention Brigade, the UN’s first combat force, which surprisingly routed M23 rebels even as the Ugandan leader insisted on hammering out a non-military solution.

READ: Will the UN’s brigade bring peace to Congo?

“The SADC option was the only way they could operate independent of what they consider as ‘regional spoilers; in the DRC,” Prof Khadiagala told The EastAfrican last November.

While Museveni still managed to push through a makeshift deal that Kinshasa and M23 signed in Kenya’s capital Nairobi on December 12, SADC’s military victory had the effect of realigning political and military influence in a region that hitherto Museveni and Kagame firmly commanded — a development that does not sit well either in Kampala or Kigali.