If indeed laughter is the best medicine then I have a bill to settle with Kagiso Ntime. This guy gives me a good dose of laughter. The youthful politician takes himself way too serious he always floors me. At times I would just look at him and fall dead with laughter even before he opens his mouth. I laugh not at his skyscraper of hair, as Guardian’s Third Eye would describe it, but at the things he has been saying since he joined the Botswana Democratic Party. Perhaps in an effort to prove his relevance and existence in the BDP politics, the young man has become loquaciously annoying. When he is not a prophet of opposition politics, he is the advisor to the ruling party.
After joining the BDP and on being asked how he was going to articulate the BDP policies which he had criticised all his life, Ntime said he was going to help the BDP leadership change some of its policies and do things the right way ÔÇô his right way. I listened and just thought to myself this guy must be thinking the BDP leadership consider his arrival as an added value to their party. I just could not understand how Ntime, as a plebe to the BDP, would even harbour such ambitions of bringing changes to the party. I mean, the BDP does not even venerate its founding fathers and as such it was hallucinatory for a new comer like Ntime to think the BDP took his coming as the arrival of a wisdom bearer.
Botswana Guardian newspaper (July 6,2012) reports Kagiso Ntime as having cautioned the BDP not to become excited in receiving defectors from opposition parties without first assessing their credentials. “The BDP should not receive everyone, it should do a thorough assessment first,” Ntime is quoted in the newspaper. Now that’s a cockamamie idea if you asked me. It would seem Ntime believes he doesn’t fall in the same category as ‘everyone’. He appears to believe he is somebody and not just anybody to be counted among everyone. I mean how else can he have the balls to call for the assessment of others when he was never assessed when he joined the BDP? The truth of the matter is, the BDP considers Ntime as just another member no different from a guy who joined the BDP at Mokoboxane after receiving a free T-shirt. Infact I have a feeling the BDP leadership must have thought of him as a complete loony when they heard him say he was going to influence change in the party and that now he is telling them what to do with people who join the party. Ntime is not telling us if he too went through the screening procedure that he is advocating for. Ntime is not telling us what this screening process would entail. Should it check the criminal background of the members joining the BDP? Should it check if these people are only joining the BDP for life’s conveniences or out of frustrations from their former parties? Should it check whether these people were rabble-rousers at their former parties? Should the BDP first check if these people are not the jezebels of politics? You see, Ntime should be very careful with what he is calling for because were his idea to materialise, he would probably be the first one to be booted out of the BDP.
Unless of course he is saying the assessment should start with only those who come after him.
It is surprising that Ntime finds BDP veterans who embrace and welcome defectors without conditions and he already feels he is a political juggernaut to dictate terms and conditions of acceptance of membership into the party. We know Ntime to be a ballsy kind of guy and I fear that the more he comes up with these silly ideas and the more the BDP trashes his ideas, we could soon witness his rebellion as he is not used to taking kindly to the leadership that does not buy into his ideas.
His fallout with the BNF leadership started when they refused to listen to his counsel on how they should go about the umbrella project. The BDP leadership should be worried that Ntime might start a war against them because obviously they are not going to heed his silly idea of screening new recruits. He wants to become a fink and it will frustrate him if he is not listened to even as he knows deep down his heart that his idea belongs in the lavatory. I suspect he only said it because he had to say something but had nothing to say. Ntime should understand that in the same way he was received at the BDP and paraded before Btv cameras without first going through an x-ray examination, all other people who defect to the BDP deserve no discrimination. Ntime is a political hopper and as such he should be reminded to stop looking at other people who want to follow in his footsteps with a jaundiced eye. This is the same guy I endorsed right here in this column when he stood for the presidency of the BNF youth league and I did so because he sounded like someone whose brains are in place. I therefore have reason to feel disappointed and worried when he now starts to talk like someone who is due for a trip to Lobatse. Ntime should focus his energies on proving that he can add value to the BDP if he seriously wants the party to take him seriously and he must know that talking gibberish won’t help him beat the long queue of aspiring young leaders that he found at the BDP.
