It will be almost impossible to tell when the collapse of the Botswana Democratic Party is afoot.
This is because from the outside the BDP looks normal, even stronger than it has been in recent years.
The truth though is that inside that façade the BDP is, by all accounts, a monastery of tormented and unhappy souls.
Though mechanically united much more than has been the case in recent times, today’s BDP is at the same time much weaker ÔÇô especially structurally.
Only one pillar holds the edifice from collapse.
And when that pillar shifts, as it will with time shift, tragedy will strike.
When this will happen can, with astounding ease, be predicted to a day – almost.
Except for President Ian Khama and, to a lesser extent, Parks Tafa, the president’s most trusted technical advisor, I cannot think of any other individual who has any reason to be happy that they are a member of the BDP.
This reality will not change even after the party congress in Maun due in a few weeks’ time.
If anything, after Maun it will get worse as reality sets in and despondency gets more engendered.
Almost all BDP members I have had the opportunity to interact with are gloomy.
Even under persistent questioning none of them is able to come up with convincing answer to prove that they know what is happening to their country, much less to their party.
The only thing they know is that President Khama is in charge.
But is he?
The greatest loser of Khama’s obsession with power and his unwillingness to share it has been the BDP.
BDP members have to accept that Khama’s growth in stature together with his personal popularity have been inversely proportional to those of the party.
As the President’s stature grew, the opposite happened to that of the party.
This is all the reason why as the leader of this political party President Khama often reminds us that he is not a politician at all.
To him, the BDP, just like other parties in opposition, is a nuisance which if he had a choice, he could dismantle and run the country without the caveats to which it often tries to subject him.
We are yet to learn of a political party unprepared and unwilling to engage with the BDP such as is the case with the BDP today.
Having amassed and centralized all the power, the trouble is that the president does not know what to do with it. He cannot use that power to deliver electricity or facilitate the completion of the country’s flagship airport.
With all the power he has, President Khama must actually be feeling like he is the most powerless man on earth.
Any prospect of him controlling either the party or country has totally disappeared right under his nose.
Which is why he is unable to stop the takeover of the party by moneymen who, only a few years past, he was putting in place systems to get them banished from the BDP.
But BDP weaknesses is only half the story.
The other half has to do with government.
Public anxiety about our government’s failure to deliver anything should also be at the centre of the president’s worries.
That anxiety also corrodes the public trust on the president’s ability to convince anybody that he is, after-all, different from everybody else.
Under President Khama, the BDP government has looked much more ordinary as it constantly and continuously fails to live up to even the most bare minimum yardstick against which we have measured its performance since time immemorial.
This failure must be viewed against the context that for all its existence, the BDP has known nothing but to rule. Running the country is all that the BDP has always done.
A question that immediately comes to mind therefore is “Of what use is a BDP that cannot run a country as is this one that we have today?”
The BDP has always won elections because against other parties it always looked and behaved differently.
But not anymore.
On that account, it is wrong to insist as other observers are saying that the opposition does not have a chance at next elections.
Defeat for the BDP will always be difficult to foretell because the party moves mountains to put public relations ahead of substance.
