A disastrous performance at the 1994 general election appeared to confirm that the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) was finally headed to the exit door and the party leadership seemed to have made peace with their destiny.
That was until De Beers got worried that the BDP loss could hand government to a hostile regime and disturb existing peace and harmony necessary for economic growth and overall prosperity and the company’s continued profiteering.
Alarmed by this possibility, the world leading Diamond Company engaged a University of Cape Town sociologist and political analyst, Professor Lawrence Schlemmer, to diagnose the party’s problems and determine how they could be fixed to ensure it remained in power.
The Schlemmer Report recommended that the BDP needed to renew itself by bringing in someone with the energy and vibe of the young generation hence the recruitment of Ian Khama from the Botswana Defence Force.
While the BDP benefited from Professor Schlemmer’s work and the short-termism treatment of a much bigger and complex problem, the party has remained troubled and vulnerable as its electoral fortunes continued to decline.
It is safe to suggest that in recent times, the BDP’s victories at the general elections owed everything to its generous social programs that bore the image of its former president Ian Khama and are very popular with the needy sections of the population. Essentially, the only glue that has been holding the party together has been Professor Schlemmer’s prescription that is fast losing its flavour.
Obvious signs are that the BDP is on the road downhill. It is a party experiencing a slow and painful disintegration and the longer it tries to hold onto power, the more it looks like a gang of delinquents squabbling over glue.
Their burgeoning appetite for opulence and extravagance and their constant bitch fights over the spoils from the looting is rendering the party unmanageable and unfit to govern.
A lot of BDP diehards have expressed their disdain for the party’s new leaders who are essentially over-glorified little men who have abandoned their mandate to govern and manage the economy, in preference for plundering the country’s treasury to build retirement and holiday homes for themselves.
Whereas it is true that the BDP has established its position in the political chess game and created a vicious cycle of dominance that shape political behavior to its advantage, the party is nevertheless comatose.
Though the ruling party’s hegemonic status owes much to its ability to control the behavior of many poor voters through its social programmes, the opposition’s lack of seriousness, its passion for fugitives and ruling party hooligans continues to aid the BDP to perpetuate its hegemony.
While the BDP is resilient and proving difficult to dethrone, the opposition whether as a collective or in bits and pieces, remains by far the major sticking point for any chance for regime change.
It all started with the opposition allowing desperation to creep in, resulting in their throwing away of erstwhile cardinal values in favor of a quick fix for political success. Accordingly, the opposition started behaving more or less like the ruling party hence the difference between the opposition and the predatory ruling BDP has become so blurred that the competition for state power is simply a small matter of drug cartels fighting for control of the drug market.
In effect, today’s opposition leaders behave like a bunch of baby-faced crooks fighting the ruling party not so much to win state power and improve the lives of our people but rather to win state power and have unlimited access to the national till.
At some point in the past, former President Dr Khama commissioned an internal investigation to ascertain the BDP electoral chances in Gaborone constituencies and the findings revealed that the BDP was just as much in trouble even in its strongholds.
Earlier in 2017, the Sunday Standard (5-10th March 2017), carried a story about projections made by Global Risk Insights which suggested a real possibility of change of government in Botswana due to declining support for the BDP.
In the same year, when addressing delegates at the BDP’s 55th National Council meeting on 24th March 2017, then President Dr Khama warned the BDP that they are trapped in their own bodies because they were incapable of preventing their own demise.
Thus, there is a consensus from several quarters including from within the ruling BDP itself that the party has reached its sell-by date. Yet, this admission is only telling half of the story for it seems to suggest that the threat to the BDP rule comes from the opposition’s forays.
While it is true that the opposition has over the years experienced exponential growth in membership and support, the reality that they have taken on the character of the ruling party means that they are unable to win the trust of the voters who are rooting for a viable alternative.
Many of our opposition leaders have a preference for items of luxury and elegance, a preference that makes them easily vulnerable to the lure of miracle money hence susceptible to be manipulated, corrupted and captured.
The BDP leaders’ appetite for luxurious lives is a familiar story that explains that people are mainly attracted to it because it offers wide ranging opportunities for its members to dip their fingers in the public till and loot the national treasury to fulfil their personal needs.
It is for this reason that the opposition has never got tired of attacking the BDP for turning the national economy into a Ponzi scheme while relegating governance to the back seat. On this account, the opposition always held high moral ground and never struggled to convince the voter that they were best equipped to manage the economy.
That cannot be said of our today’s opposition, especially the UDC with its stacks of dirty money that has enabled its leaders to match the extravagance of the ruling party thieves pound for pound.
In effect, it is very difficult to distinguish the opposition, in spite of all their sweet talk, from the sly, sticky-fingered witches at the BDP even as the opposition feigns humanity and concern for the poor.
What this means is that whereas the BDP is clearly no longer interested in governing because they have all their eyes on the till, the erstwhile alternative government has equally lost interest in offering effective oversight as much as they have lost the motivation to remove the BDP from state power mainly because they are flush with cash which was probably their motivation to get into politics.
After missing state power by a tiny margin at the 2019 general election, it was expected that the UDC would do a thorough introspection and use the results of that introspection to figure out a more successful electoral formula.
Instead of introspecting, they remained faithful to that tired cliché that the BDP had rigged the elections. The implication is that the 2019 campaign recipe had worked like magic and has to be repeated in the next campaign cycle.
This means that the UDC will actually return to the familiar routine and pursue the strategy that only succeeded in taking them to the verge of electoral victory in 2019. Essentially, the UDC is actively pursuing a losing strategy no matter how stylish it may look and any slight improvement in performance in the future will only be down to the voters’ dislike for the ruling party rather than a preference for the UDC.
Whereas both the BDP and the main coalition nurse high hopes of clinching the coveted prize for state power in the next general election, the real deal would be whom the voters would just happen to hate less between the 2 demons.
While the BDP is sure to bet on a powerful mix of state terror and public monies to kill off any meaningful challenge and secure its converts respectfully, the UDC is sure to advance the tried and tested model of how to lose a general election.
But both fundamentally share commonalities in deed and attitude, which means the UDC, can no longer rely on voicing fears for the future of Botswana since they too have morphed into starved wolves that have tasted blood and are ready to chow.
The UDC has sold off its revolutionary politics, its identity and has taken on the appearance of bandits awaiting their chance to walk the corridors of power. And the tragedy of its all is that while the BDP is about to succumb, the main coalition does not know what it stand for anymore. And therein is an opportunity for an unpretentious political outfit to offer something different and give renewed hope to our people. That political outfit would surely be a better alternative than the current government and its duplicate masquerading as an alternative government.
