The General Elections due next year will bring greater turbulence for Serowe and the neighboring environs.
That will be neither incidental nor a coincidence.
The elections will provide a further stress test to the stability of chieftainship in that area.
Pressure on Serowe has been unrelenting.
There is a subtle but persistent process of tribal appropriation currently playing in those areas.
Serowe has been at the eye of ongoing political tumult.
Already the area is paying a price for being the heart of ongoing tussle for power between president Mokgweetsi Masisi and his predecessor Ian Khama.
Masisi, through his government and Ian Khama have become pole opposite.
The two sides are literally bogged down in what often looks like a stalemate
Khama says he does not want Serogola Seretse at the Kgotla. And government has rooted for Serogola.
Serowe, for long the stronghold of the ruling party has now fallen off its guardrails.
That the people of Serowe should be entangled in it all was almost inevitable.
Just for the record I am not one of them. In fact I have had my own grievances against that kingdom.
For Khama, Serowe is not a soft underbelly. It is not a backyard. It is a nerve centre of his political support.
And Masisi is dead determined to undo all that, and if need be to beat Khama at his own headquarters.
The president will stop at nothing to achieve that.
What has been happening in Serowe, especially at the main Kgotla can very easily spark not only tribal imaginations but a national strife – the kind of which was happened in the 1990s led on the one hand by Pitso Ya Batswana and SPILL (Society for the Promotion of Ikalanga Language) on the other.
Ordinary people in Serowe find themselves trapped in the middle of what is going on.
In a brazenly paternalistic way, government is now revitalizing the Serowe Kgotla down into their own idealistic imaginations.
What should be mundane and innocuous routines like attending a kgotla meeting have now become a big risk for villagers across Serowe.
The very coherence and unity of Serowe is now not only at risk but also the ultimate prize.
The institution of bogosi in Serowe is being politically redefined, all to fix Ian Khama; I am not crying for Ian Khama. He too did it during his time.
The double whammy of realigning bogosi and down the line removing the incumbent political leadership will conspire to have a disorientating effect on the Serowe local community.
Let’s be blunt, much of government behaviour in Serowe is calculated provocation.
At the moment the three parliamentary seats in that area are occupied by the Botswana Patriotic Front. Khama is their patron.
Quite expectedly, the BDP has been ramping up its influence in the area and trying to make their way back.
Late last year the party’s youth committee made a pilgrimage to Serowe and camped there for a week.
It will not have an impact.
It will take much more than a political campaign to defeat Khama in those three parliamentary seats.
One way to reduce the Khama influence would be to realign the Serowe constituencies.
With less to play for, the stakes will be reduced.
Khama is the paramount traditional leader in those areas. And the people there are personally loyal to him.
For them that loyalty is much more important than partisan politics.
Botswana government has an obligation to be generous in its application of the law.
If it is able to do that, it will be much easier for them to occupy a moral high ground.
That takes statesmanship.
During his time former president Khama opted to be fully legalistic in his approach to power.
That made him to be the first leader who went farthest to teach Batswana the extent to which the Botswana Constitution gave power to the sate president.
Where his predecessors, especially Sir Ketumile Masire had consciously restrained themselves in the exercise of their powers, Khama went full length to utilise the powers given him by the Constitution.
And he milked those powers to the fullest.
Yet for the people in Serowe, the current president will appear nothing if not vindictive.
In the last elections they voted for BPF.
And ever since, it is like they are being made to pay a price for the constitutional right to choose a party and members of parliament they liked.
An impression should not be created that by voting BPF, the people from Serowe have committed a political crime.
In short it is counterproductive to target people from Serowe on account of who they voted for.
As it is, the BDP has manifestly failed to show grace in defeat.
Instead of using unsavoury machinations to win back those Serowe parliamentary seats, the BDP should make strenuous, over the radar political efforts to show that as a political party they can better represent the people from that area than the BPF.
There is something heartless in using armed police and other law enforcement agencies to attack old and unarmed villagers, some of them in their nineties and stopping them from entering the kgotla, a place that is sacrosanct to many of them.
That contaminates not only the BDP but our country’s national systems as well.
