Exactly a week ago, I had a private discussion with one opposition Member of Parliament during which time I argued that had Botswana’s opposition parties behaved themselves two years ago and agreed to cooperate, they would most likely be favoured with at least 21 constituencies in next year’s General Elections; the closest they would ever have come to taking over state power from the BDP.
As if instinctively, the Honourable MP agreed and hinted something to the effect that, with hindsight, it was a gross mistake on their part that opposition parties failed to set aside their trivial differences in favour of settling for the ultimate trophy.
Intellectually astute, the MP added that in a very big way the opposition parties had squandered a rare opportunity and effectively scored an own goal from which recovery is unlikely, however optimistic one tried to be.
He mused something to the effect that because they are fragmented and besieged by character crisis, the opposition parties are not able to take advantage of what is, by all accounts, a vicious wave of resentment and divisions currently sweeping across the BDP.
During our discussion, I also ventured that had the opposition parties agreed to cooperate, the BNF would easily have averted its current slide into darkness, which, by any measure, seems now to have become irreversible and, to a large degree, irreparable.
Again, the MP nodded his head before adding that he had never seen a political party more willing and eager to abandon itself, its philosophy and its supporters than the BNF.
He grumbled that it was BNF leadership’s perennial tantrums and their ill-tempered refusal to make concessions to other opposition parties that has literally poisoned the public’s view of opposition politics and served to further entrench cynicism against these parties’ potential to become alternative centers of power.
I cannot agree more. The opposition parties, most especially the BNF, have no one to blame but themselves for the spectre of extinction that stares at them.
There is a general consensus that, without each other’s support, neither the BNF nor the BCP is ready to perform the duties of a credible opposition let alone be in line to forming a national government.
Which is why, desperate as they are for change, the people on the ground are now bracing themselves for a long haul under an increasingly insensitive BDP government.
Having given up on BNF, many people are helplessly and hopelessly clinching their wrists in full knowledge that for them the future holds a systematic, state sponsored attack on people’s freedoms and civil liberties.
One remembers a few years ago when this column was savagely scolded for having dared to argue that if they were to remain relevant in Botswana’s fast changing politics, the BNF needed to rebrand and reposition itself.
Instead of heeding the free advice rendered, the party leadership chose to dig their heels into a shiftless insincerity.
Now they are paying the ultimate price. Having lost interest, voters are simply keeping away.
One remembers with a shameless sense of nostalgia, how some time back the BNF was widely accepted as a party of hope and social justice.
That same party is today looked at as a haven of anarchy and lawlessness.
How fast things change!
For most of the last 25 years, the BNF was by far a dominant source of ideas on Botswana’s national stage.
During those 20 odd years, when Kenneth Koma was the BNF leader, the party literally set agenda for the ruling party.
In many ways the BNF, through Kenneth Koma, gleefully infiltrated, manipulated and influenced the public service.
Looking at the feeble minnows running the party today and those fighting from the shadows to wrestle it from them, I doubt the BNF will, at least in the foreseeable future, be able to produce a leader able to dominate the national stage for as long a time and emphatic a fashion as Koma did.
With just a handful of MPs then, the BNF effortlessly dominated Botswana’s public discourse, pointedly taking the battle lines to the ruling party with vigour and valour.
Not anymore!
Today’s BNF exudes an air of impotence and, in some cases, decay.
Not only is the party detached and estranged from the aspirations of ordinary people, it is seen by many as the very embodiment of disappointment, a glaring example of how a people’s dreams can be recklessly shattered by an insensitive custodian of public trust.
Not only is today’s BNF wallowing through a policy vacuum, the last few years have seen the party stumble from one internal disaster and misfortune to another.
The underlying problem, which none of them is prepared to admit, is that collectively the current crop of BNF leaders suffers from a lack of imagination.
The pro-Moupo has lost whatever credibility that they may have once possessed.
But the bigger problem is that the University of Botswana-based socialists, pretending to be an alternative, are in the same breadth looked down by the voters as a clique of despotic clowns who cannot be trusted for a day with power.
It is for those reasons that even the BNF diehard supporters are of the view that unless the party musters a new sense of purpose and direction, it would be irresponsible to vote it in next year’s elections.
Looking back during the cooperation negotiations, it is deplorable that the BNF leadership failed to realize that, by any set of rules and by whatever name, they were always going to emerge a leader of any cooperation arrangement that was hammered out.
It is disgraceful to see that the BNF leadership failed to see that it was for them, as the biggest party, to make the biggest concessions as they would invariably emerge the overall winner in the end.
This shortsightedness, which is a function of a lack of strategic thinking inside the BNF, has meant that over a short span of time, the once mighty party has degenerated into an irrelevant and outdated relic.
Today’s internal feuds besieging the BNF are in no small measure an aftermath of that party’s reluctance (or should we say failure) to realize that history had always bestowed on them the onus to be a leader among today’s opposition parties in Botswana.
Which is why I agree with the MP, who incidentally is a BNF member, that the BNF has become a party of yesterday.
