Things have turned up really bad for Botswana National Front over the last ten years.
Under the watch of Otsweletse Moupo, arguably one of the best brains and certainly the most likeable and self-effacing of the BNF leaders, the party had become irrelevant.
It could still get worse, especially if as it increasingly looks likely, the anarchist ideologues that initially backed Moupo for the leadership before a failed ouster are allowed back into the fold and get a free hand to do as they please.
From early on, Duma Boko, the new party leader, is going to have to show spine and demonstrate to this cabal that he is in charge.
It will not be easy for Boko, not least because these are control freaks who think that the BNF is their private property to control, to manipulate and, in other instances, to literally terrorise.
But still he should try.
The first point of call would be for him to leave no ambiguity with regards to where he stands on opposition party cooperation.
There used to be a feeling that BNF was so resilient that it could always bounce back from whatever disaster befell it.
Their horrible performance at last year’s General Election has busted that myth.
There is no question that stuck with the BDP for close to half a century, Batswana are now openly casting about for an alternative. Patience is fast wearing thin with the BDP, hence an amazing public goodwill that is currently enjoyed by Botswana Movement for Democracy ÔÇô a totally new political outfit, which other than telling us how evil the BDP is, are themselves still to even start telling us what it is that they will do differently once given the baton.
On behalf of the BNF, Boko has to try and cash in on the seemingly unstoppable wave for political change blowing across the country.
History will judge Boko harshly were he to fail to position BNF on a stronger pedestal as to be able to claim a seat within that alternative.
To be fair to him, Boko is still to give the nation an opportunity to get a glimpse at himself and what it is that he really stands for.
It would be disingenuous, dishonest and unfair of us were we to judge him by the mistakes of his predecessor.
But the challenges that Boko faces are not very much different from those that Moupo faced and badly failed to measure up to.
Those challenges include restoring the BNF to its past glory and making the party relevant once again. They also include showing strong leadership as to be able to resist a strong communist lobby inside the BNF that in the face of all evidence pointing to the contrary still cannot hide its disdain for working with other opposition parties.
The Botswana Congress Party and the Botswana Movement for Democracy are political realities that BNF cannot wish away. The BDP tried to ignore them but all evidence that in all it is doing the ruling party is actively factoring in both BCP and the BMD.
In its current state, the BNF is ill-prepared to single-handedly take the BDP head-on. From the results of last year’s elections, today’s BNF is weaker than the BNF that went into a general election in 1994, and we cannot help but remember that we are talking some fifteen years ago.
One cannot fairly be accused of an anti-BNF strain for saying that based on the outcome of last year’s elections, BNF is no longer an important part of our national political script, certainly not in terms proportionate to the political space the party used to occupy. Over the past few months, our political landscape has changed so drastically that however hard he tried, reclaiming BNF’s lost ground will be the hardest, perhaps most impossible thing for Duma Boko, especially if he is goaded to go it alone, as the subtext of last week’s events in Lobatse seem to so clearly imply.
Thus for the sake of the nation and, indeed in the interest of his BNF, Boko should acknowledge BCP and BMD – especially the BMD- and be humble enough as to admit that this is a party that is currently bestriding the national platform, enjoying a colossal goodwill the size of which only the late Kenneth Koma was ever able to deliver into the BNF bloodstream.
Except to the uncaring and self-serving ultra-leftists who are more obsessed with their devious ambitions to turn the BNF into a test tube of failed ideologies, the party is repellent and does not embody much hope for the future.
It’s highly likely that given the high regard with which I once held it, I have now become disenchanted as to be prejudiced against both the BNF and the socialists that high-jacked it a few years ago, but truth be told, it has always pained and disappointed me (as Moupo once rightly observed) that a political party that previously provided a political home and hope to so many Batswana of goodwill could in a span of just a few years be brought on its knees, corrupted into a moribund abode for divisive, multi-faced anarchists that cannot think of anything beyond Karl Marx’s ancient polemics.
In his task to lead the BNF out of darkness, one can only suppose that bringing back the excitement should be high on Boko’s priorities.
Of course, there is no alternative to resuscitating the rubbles that have become what used to be BNF vibrant structures.
In which case wreaking a close working relationship with both the BCP and BMD is not an option but a must.
Any other path leads to the rock bottom!
