The suspended Botswana National Front (BNF) youth president, Kagiso Ntime, was this week singing praises for the Botswana Congress Party (BCP) while  dismissing his party as being in disarray.
Kagiso Ntime wrote another missive this week, very much similar to the one that got him suspended as youth league president, claiming an internal strife started and fueled by the BNF executive committee threatened to tear the party apart.
┬á“The BNF has been hijacked by oligarchic neo-liberals whose mission is to sideline and fire progressive cadres in the movement. This clique in the BNF Executive Committee is not concerned about the ideology and policies of the BNF. What matters the most to them is their selfish interests and their agenda is to stifle inner-party democracy and surround themselves with cronies who never question them. This has led to gross divisions in the movement and promoted negative factionalism,”┬á┬áNtime charged.
┬á“Their primary target has been the BNF Youth League leaders and party veterans. They have, in execution of their evil plan, suspended principled cadres and attempted to set up structures composed of their “yes men and women”, Ntime wrote.
Heaping praise on the BCP, Ntime said the party has smart leadership, though not entirely progressive.
“The BCP has in recent years, owing to the failure of BNF leadership, established itself as an organised brand that can be trusted by those aggrieved by the Botswana Democratic Party misrule. The BCP has managed to maintain some desirable level of stability and inner-party democracy and continues to manage differences among its ranks in a more mature and comradely manner,” Ntime wrote.
He said one such illustration is how they handled the recent feud between its Youth League and the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament.
“The BCP leadership is not excited at suspending its cadres willy-nilly. They tolerate divergent views and take their time to understand situations before they act. They do not just act on impulse. The BCP leadership appears to be driven more by the desire to grow their party and hold BDP accountable rather than witch-hunts of cadres. This does not, in any way, suggest that the BCP has the best policy outlook and ideological construction. What it simply means is that the BCP is currently the best organized party with a more focused leadership that is not pre-occupied with petty and pugnacious altercations,” he wrote.
Ntime observes that the BCP is most likely to emerge as the main opposition party in terms of popular vote and members of parliament.
“This BCP success will be made possible by its organizational compactness. In the absence of a workers’ party with a robust working class ideology, sections of civil society, including the labour unions and student formations, will align themselves with the BCP as their only hope in their quest to deliver themselves from the chagrins of poverty and social and economic deprivation,” he wrote.
Ntime is worried that at the BNF party processes and procedures have been trampled upon. He predicts that the BNF is headed for a total showdown “as principled comrades cannot just fold their arms and watch as the National Democratic Revolution is betrayed by a few oligarchic neo-liberals and their friends”.
