As General Elections date draws ever closer and the acrimony and fallout emanating from badly mismanaged primary elections and protest processes get shriller, inside the ruling BDP there also grows an uncanny sense of d├®j├á vu about it all; toxic language, gossip, bad-blood, backstabbing, accusations and counter-accusations. Old alliances and allegiances are beginning to resurface as old hostilities become more pronounced. It is all about a fight for the future. Everybody is looking way beyond just 2014. There is a feeling among many that they have been pushed too far.
Some of them have started confiding to close friends, family members and associates that they have reached a point of no return. For many of them, clearly they are already thinking of a life after BDP. It is an open secret that a sizeable number of them are holding parleys with the opposition, cutting corners as each one of them negotiates their political futures in different by related ways. Loyalty to the party has all but been set aside. It is all a matter of survival.
The BDP has been presented with a choice: it can deal with the aggrieved members by way of appeasement or it can tell them to simply go to hell. So far the party is broadly choosing the latter option. Not surprisingly many of the aggrieved are looking forward to getting to hell. Such has been a collapse of faith and loyalty in the immortality of the BDP brand among the aggrieved that already some of them are saying the party will not outlive President Ian Khama’s political career ÔÇô at least not in the current form. There is thus for themselves no point in waiting just as there is no harm going ahead and calving own destinies, including against the party.
Based on their ability to discount any future reprisals from the BDP, many of the aggrieved reckon they have nothing to lose afterall. We have been here before. It is exactly how Botswana Movement for Democracy was created. When the BDP split a few years ago it was on account of deep-seated feelings among the then aggrieved that they were unwanted by leadership and increasingly picked on and persecuted with the party even ready and willing to purge some of them. As was the case pre-split, the aggrieved of today are increasingly bold in their demand for fairness, consistency, predictability and evenhandedness; exactly the kind of attributes that have however been so patently absent among today’s Central Committee of the BDP.
Losing an election is never an easy thing to accept much less endorse and even work together harmoniously with an erstwhile rival. It takes emotional courage and familial support for one to come to terms with electoral defeat. It’s even harder to work towards acceptance and eventual closure when there is ample proof of rigging, fraud and duplicity as has been the case with BDP primaries an indeed the protests. Favoritism seals it all and makes it impossible. But still some of the aggrieved would clearly have been prepared and willing to let bygones be bygones had a way been found to assuage, placate even appease their concerns.
As it is the party has decimally failed to negotiate the terms of surrender for this lot. Feeling alone, humiliated and unwanted, they are now raising the stakes including by talking to the enemy camp, if only to salvage whatever little they can for themselves. Their conduct is akin to adopting a scorched earth policy. Call them selfish, self-centered, greedy or even unprincipled. For them it has long ceased to matter. Such is human nature when all avenues of dignity are closed out and amicable solutions are spurned.
Its current travails aside, the BDP remains by far the greatest assurance and guarantee of political victory for many candidates who take part in a national election. But the fact that the party’s own aggrieved activists are now willing to risk their lifelong guarantees of political protections including wide ranging suites of largesse (real and perceived) by itself indicates a sea change in dynamics. It signals a growth in the belief that the opposition too has a chance and that the BDP is no longer as invincible as it once was. It is no longer a one-man show. Days of a defacto one-party state which we have bemoaned for a generation now may be coming to an end.
And for that we should all celebrate. The governing Botswana Democratic Party has to find a way to negotiate with its aggrieved members who feel hard-done; first by a fraudulent set of primary elections, followed by a stage managed set of protest hearings. A failure do that would be tantamount to digging one’s grave. BDP leadership would do itself by talking advice from an English probe: When in a hole, stop digging. The leadership’s current fallacy of closing their eyes and hoping difficult questions would be over when they reopen their eyes will simply not make reality go away.
