Ever since 1966, when the Obote faction, assisted by the army, overthrew the 1962 constitutional arrangements and introduced the Republican Constitution of 1967, peaceful handover of power by constitutional means has eluded the Ugandan political process. In seeking to account for this fluid state of political affairs, the author suggests that the colonial institutional arrangements, the fragmented political elites, and the unbalanced allocation of resources provided a setting for political institutional normlessness. Moreover, as long as there are no widely acceptable formulae among politically significant social forces to resolve conflicts short of physical force, and as long as one social political force imposes its own rules and continues to do so while it has the means, instability will thrive. Ref.
