I collapse into frustration and deep despair every time I hear somebody say there is no state funding of political parties in Botswana. The fact of the matter is that there is an elaborate such funding of the ruling party. It happens right before our very eyes. We see it every other day but choose not to acknowledge it. And there is more to it than meets the eye. With some security organs virtually operating unregulated as to be rogue elephants that are virtual laws unto themselves, political party funding is more than ever before a potential haven for money laundering by security chiefs working in cahoots with their security-minded political masters.
Unless the system is changed, this anomaly will most likely continue even with a different party in power. A lack of transparency surrounding political party funding – and this applies to all political parties should be a source worry to those genuinely concerned with national security matters. As one university professor said at a meeting I attended early this week, the dark cloud of secrecy hanging over party funding allows expansive room for dirty money entering our mainstream: “Money washing” is the phrase the professor used. A few weeks ago at an event to launch their manifesto, the Botswana Democratic Party wrapped their three day odyssey by giving every one of the fifty seven constituencies a brand new campaign vehicle. For cash-strapped opposition this might often have come across as an obscene show of opulence. But for BDP members accustomed to such rendezvous showoffs this has happened so often times that it now feels like a conventional rite of passage that happens every five years. While conservative estimates place the cost of the loot at around P14 million, there has been no official mention of how the booty has been raised, adding to an already long and woeful record of financial secrecy that started long before De Beers and the Oppenheimer family joined in to become some of the party’s benefactors in chief.
A closer look reveals that the BDP electoral campaign machinery is by far the country’s most glaring and ruthless abuse of the instruments of incumbency. With all the tools at their disposal which include a master of largesse that is their leader, the opposition is simply no match for the ruling party. In the next few weeks and months President Ian Khama will start the campaign in earnest. By the time elections are over, alone he would have spent more money on campaigning than all the candidates in the country put together ÔÇô all of it fully paid for by the state. He will be taking advantage of an arrangement under which when it comes to a sitting President there is no difference between party and state.
This blurred line has provided an alibi of abuse and grandiose mismanagement that has reached unprecedented heights under the current administration. The amount of state resources enjoyed by one contender for power against the others amounts to tying an opponent’s hands behind their back before calling on a fight to start. What is even more frustrating is that an entire nation still chooses not to see that all this amounts to a clear-cut case of state funding of one political party against others. There is no sense of morality, however faint. One is not saying it is wrong to provide the State President with state financed political party campaign tools like a private jet and a helicopter to traverse the country. But such hefty state funding should at the very least be acknowledged as such.
President Khama makes much of his consultative walkabouts. Reality though is that as was the case in last elections he is actually his party’s campaigner in chief. With so much at stake such walkabout have now become a very convenient pretext for electioneering. Quite deliberately, whenever he makes many of these outings, it is never clear whether he is wearing a BDP hat or a national one. The line will become even more blurred in the coming weeks and months in the run up to October General Elections. What is clear though is that he never misses on an opportunity to sell his political party over other contenders, with trade unions and the private media often added as butt-end collateral damage.
This notwithstanding the fact that strictly speaking, Khama is himself not a candidate, not just because he is not standing any one constituency, but more crucially because Botswana does not have a system of direct election of a president. The same tricks are applied by cabinet ministers, albeit at a much lesser scale compared to the president.
Is it any wonder that when Kgalagadi Breweries, a publicly listed company transparently donated money to all political parties based on immediate past performance, the BDP was the first to register thinly veiled irritation at this act of equitable benevolence? For them such acts of political equity threaten to break exclusivity and their financial hegemony.
