There is a groundswell of deep-seated public disillusion against automatic succession.
Thankfully, the whirlwind is building up even from inside the ruling party.
It will not stop unless the system is changed.
Automatic succession is inherently flawed.
It is the biggest contamination of our otherwise rich democratic values.
It is inherently undemocratic and easily susceptible to abuse and misuse.
It is a slap in the face for the public who are supposed to decide for themselves who they want as their national president.
As things stand, automatic succession is the crudest form of privatizing and outsourcing what is by all intents and purposes the most important of all public offices.
It is by far the best example of how little faith our leaders have in the very people they are supposed to lead.
In an impalpably cruel way, automatic succession effectively cuts off the people from the decision of who ascends to the most powerful office on the land.
Given that the Office of the President is occupied by a person who wields power over us and over everything about, us we surely need a say on who occupies it.
Anything less amounts to mercenary-like tactics.
It’s time our system is changed so that our President is elected by and made answerable to the people. We can no longer bask in the glory of the make believe perfectionism.
Unless it is changed, the system is bound to remain a festering wound in our public discourse.
We like to boast that we are better than Zimbabwe.
We are used to beating ourselves in the chest that we have the best democracy in the continent.
That is all rubbish.
For all the crimes of their leader, the Zimbabweans do get an opportunity to elect their President.
For our part in the name of democracy we have a system under which so much power is vested in the hands of just one man; an unelected person for that matter.
We need to take power back to the people. We can only do that by holding elections for the Office of President.
It is no wonder that cynics are beginning to look down at democracy as the most abused word of our time.
Democracy has become a catchword for autocrats.
They use it not just to usurp state power but to also remain therein.
In the meantime the sense of public powerlessness is simply overwhelming.
This past week, one man, unelected to the position of President effectively pronounced to a helpless nation that he will in the course of time decide who the country’s next president will be.
Khama had earlier told an equally dumbfounded BDP caucus that General Merafhe, his caretaker and stop gap Vice President will not become Vice President.
It’s more like Alice in Wonderland.
It’s like we have become a monarchy, whereupon the monarch capriciously decides who among his favourite children would be coronated upon the monarch’s death.
That is not democracy.
Under a democracy, aspiring contenders should be allowed to square up, with the ultimate decision of who wins residing with the people.
Far from infusing any form of stability, automatic succession has made our politics shamelessly boring.
Instead of infusing stability, automatic succession has dissipated whatever little enthusiasm people used to have for politics and politicians.
Because it bottles up people’s voices in choosing their leaders rather than bring about predictability, automatic succession is set to ignite incoherence and breed about new frontiers of dissent.
The bigger tragedy is that this flawed system allows for cutting and carving of secret deals between the outgoing President and his successor. It has become a tool of patronage and largesse spreading.
It gives room to the outgoing President to maintain an unwanted shadow and even loathsome intrusion into our political discourse long after their stay has elapsed.
In short automatic succession distorts as to contaminate our politics.
Not only is it a breeding ground for cronyism, it also begets sycophancy and kills not just ambition but also internal debate within our institutions of power.
The biggest problem facing Botswana now is that no key figure is brave enough to ignite the debate let alone point out the follies of this arrangement.
At least for now, the natural constituencies remain enamoured by the incoming President.
The middle class look up to him and his government for lucrative contracts.
The civil society relishes the hope that he would be generous as to increase their sustenance perks.
The academia is mesmerized, with some among of them hoping to be appointed ambassadors and Specially Elected members of parliament.
The media has literally lined up behind the incoming president for admission into his fan club of unthinking admirers with each journalist screaming loudest wanting to become the most amiable cheerleader.
Lest we forget, automatic succession in Botswana has its roots in the history of favouritism.
It is founded on the weight of BDP’s internal disunity.
These are all the reasons why the arrangement has become an unmitigated blight that has to be urgently erased from our public discourse.
