At the launch of cooperation talks between the Alliance for Progressives and the Botswana Congress Party, the AP leader Ndaba Gaolathe arrived dressed in a lime tie, the BCP colour.
The BCP leader, Dumelang Saleshando came wearing a purple tie, the AP colour.
The program for the day was deliberately made light and brief – laden with songs, chants and slogans.
There was no reference to Duma Boko or his UDC.
In fact I don’t recall anybody mentioning the ruling BDP by name.
The event was more smooches and little politics. The whole thing sounded and certainly felt like a young couple in new love.
Of the two leaders, Gaolathe was the first to take to the stage. He portrayed a sunny side for the future Botswana.
He talked about that place as a country of equal opportunities.
Even for the converted and the most charitable it sounded too good to be true.
He sent his audience into stiches, not with any political message but by warning Saleshando that he will one day outperform him on the dance floor, presumably that will be day when they will be ushering in the dreamland.
When it was Saleshando’s turn, not even that most political of all political animals could venture into politics save briefly when he quoted American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson’s “Margin of Despair” speech with which he launched his short-lived shot at the White House.
There is a subtext to the ongoing AP/BCP bromance: the two parties are under the iron grip of hardliners. Both Saleshando and Gaolathe have been literally corralled and dragged to the negotiating table. An activist tells me before the talks could even start there had to be a “Truth and Reconciliation” exercise conducted for the two men.
While the BCP and AP hardliners are desperate to be portrayed differently, in real life they have more similarities to BNF’s Fearfokol than they would want us believe.
They are intolerant and often aggressive to those expressing a different opinion, including to their own party colleagues.
As is the with their nemesis on the other side, for this lot it is their way or the highway.
They are impatient, irascible and pricklier.
Any slight criticism, however constructive makes them to explode.
It is a result of the fact that they have become very hasty in their efforts to get state power.
In their conversational range Duma Boko is a constant. Not only is he a bogeyman, he is forever blasted.
In their eyes he is a spent political force.
The new formation being touted is manifestly not a by-product of AP and BCP mainstream wings.
The new formation when it comes to life will be a product of hardliners who share deep-seated grievances and contempt for Duma Boko and his UDC. These are the people who are not only disdainful of Boko, but who actively dislike and detest him. Against Boko they bear the McCarthyite-like suspicion and cynicism.
For now, the two leaders – Dumelang Saleshando and Ndaba Gaolathe are literally captives of these hardline wings of their respective parties.
Which is by itself tragic because the two men, for all their human weaknesses are pragmatic politicians.
With little or no room to maneuver, they pityingly resemble caged animals.
The AP and BCP hardliners want the electorate to confer on them much more deference than they actually deserve. They are abnormally aware that time is not on their side.
It beggars belief, but what they are asking of the voter is a blanket show of trust – a leap of faith, you might say. Yet this is a voter who has been through this before. A voter who has already seen the movie they are being asked to watch.
In fair contest politics hardliners seldom win elections. This should be a guiding principle for each potential voter as we weigh whether or not to give the new formation a chance.
Both the BCP and AP have genuine grievances against Boko and how he runs UDC.
And we should not make light of those. But it makes greater sense to fight from within.
UDC has to be democratized to make it withstand stress-tests that come with state power.
We should not forget the history of the current turmoil.
BCP came into the UDC under an irrefutably faulty and defective track.
That left many people, chiefly Ndaba Gaolathe angry, dismayed and disappointed – but more crucially also helpless.
Everybody knew what the process was. And Gaolathe had wanted that process to be followed. Instead his opponents at the time, principally from within his own BMD briefed against him that he was against BCP joining because he was scared Dumelang Saleshando would take his defacto position as UDC’s number2.
That false position was to be magnified, drummed up and repeated over and over again by the BCP leader. And the BCP members swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
For his part the UDC leader was in a hurry to get to the State House. He genuinely believed – quite wrongly as we now know that he could rely on BCP to achieve that.
And to get the BCP into the UDC Boko set aside all rules and protocols – along the way trashing anyone who advised caution.
With BCP now firmly by his side, everybody else, including his longtime loyalist and trusted lieutenant had now become expendable.
The rest is history.
Since then opposition politics has become more fractious and very shrill in tone.
Some of the BCP demands, deadlines and ultimatums on UDC and on Boko specifically sound like fantasies.
BCP knows well how unrealistic some its demands are.
They are a pretext designed to create an impression that BCP is doing its bit under what are exceptionally difficult conditions. And also that there is essentially nothing the other partner is doing.
At the launch a BCP activist turned priest, Councillor Oarabile Motlaleng put it more succinctly.
He begged Saleshando to tell the nation that AP and BCP are now one.
He pleaded with BCP leader to pronounce to the nation that BCP has now left the UDC, because as he put it, that is the reality and anything to the contrary is not only untrue but a waste of time.
AP are not coming into the new flirtation empty-handed.
They too are bringing at the front a significant army that has an axe to grind against Duma Boko.
Thus AP and BCP are more linked by their shared grievances, especially their dreams for revenge.
Botswana’s politics are always colourful and full of surprises.
But leaders rocking in each other’s party colours is a well beaten theatric.
At the very first negotiations that sired the UDC, the late Gomolemo Motswaledi, then the leader of the Botswana Movement for Democracy rocked at a rally wearing the BCP colours, Duma Boko of the BNF was in a BMD shirt and Dumelang Saleshando was in BNF colours – or something to that effect. There was a lot of hope in the air.
More than ten years later we have become painfully aware of many tragic political events that have followed thereafter. The result was a stillbirth.
Ominously, the midwives of a stillborn child from that era were in the room again this week. Lebang Mpotokwane and Emang Maphanyane were introduced this week. The two looked faithful, hopeful and dutiful as they did more than ten years ago.
The only difference today is that the two statesmen look much older and much frailer than they did at the first round of opposition unity talks.
