Kabuleta: The Fear Factor Is Gone — Muhoozi Backed Himself Into a Corner.

Former presidential candidate Joseph Kabuleta is sounding the alarm — and his message is getting darker. Kabuleta, who previously predicted that the Museveni regime would not survive beyond June next year, now says “the centre cannot hold” and argues that the plan to eventually install Muhoozi Kainerugaba as Museveni’s successor is running into serious trouble. Then he gets cryptic. Kabuleta says by January, people inside the regime could start dying. That is his prediction, not an established fact, and should be treated as such. But his bigger argument is about fear. According to Kabuleta, Muhoozi gambled on Ugandans being too frightened to resist — that the threat of abduction, detention and torture would keep people silent. Kabuleta says that gamble has failed. Because fear only works while people believe the threat is unbeatable. Once people realize they can be threatened, detained or abducted and still come back speaking, the psychological equation changes. Kabuleta puts it bluntly: when you gamble on fear, when the fear breaks, it breaks for once. And that, he says, is exactly what has happened. The fear factor is gone. His broader argument is that the regime may have made a fundamental political miscalculation: it bet on fear — and discovered that fear has an expiration date.