Victory for the Botswana Democratic Party is not inevitable at the next General Elections due in 2019.
If such victory happens, it will be mainly as a result of a weak opposition rather than a strong BDP.
For a party that has known nothing else but power, this is an altogether new territory for the BDP.
The situation is complicated by a leadership transition that is due to happen next year.
While Vice President Mokgweetsi Masisi has now been assured that he will be the next president, that transition, is still far from seamless.
There are too many aggrieved interests that Masisi will have to conquer or appease.
Given his fighting demeanour, his likeliest instinct might be to obliterate any opposing forces and not reach out by way of attempting to placate them.
That might work in the short term. But that would most unlikely provide any lasting solutions.
As a build-up to the presidency, taming the BDP has so far consumed a lot of Masisi’s time.
But in due course he will come to realize that the BDP was not by any stretch among his biggest troubles. The real opponents are outside the BDP.
Trade Unions, not least those aligned to him and his BDP will with time want to engender own hegemony by demanding a seat at the top table.
This will not be an easy thing to deal with.
The first few months of his inherited presidency might prove the busiest of his whole life.
He will have quite a few choices to make.
Does he craft a presidency moulded in his own tastes and image or he fights to maintain the Khama legacy of which he has been nothing if not a stump?
It is either Khama’s or his own highway. Not both.
This is so because Khama has been an extremist leader ÔÇô who relished adopting scorched earth policies.
First and foremost, Masisi will have to stamp out corruption, including among the intelligence services, the leaders of who are among his chief backers, clearly with the intention to use him as part of their protection fees.
He might find himself in a position where he would have to prosecute and even jail some of the ringleaders. Ill-gotten money and indeed properties might have to be seized.
Retaining an attachment to these discredited leftovers of the Khama regime will present serious political complications for Masisi. It will make his attempts to become an independent author of his own presidency insurmountably difficult.
A failure to take such drastic actions might for him cut an unwanted image of a monkey rather than organ grinder.
Additionally it will create doubts over whether or not he was his own man ÔÇô especially since revelations that his campaign towards the presidency is financed by a clutch of moneyed Indo-Asian commercial axis holding the Botswana Democratic Party and the country in thrall.
But crucially, a failure to dismantle Khama’s corrupt business-intelligence complex would provide the now limping opposition with a much needed crutch to say that even with a new face in the State House, overall, it remains business as usual.
Another important thing that Masisi will have to do, probably in the first few days of his presidency would be to abolish the Alcohol Levy.
The Alcohol Levy has from the beginning been an enduring example of Ian Khama’s thoughtless economic policies that ruined this country and brought it on its knees.
When it comes to bleeding of votes by the BDP, the Alcohol Levy is perhaps only second to corruption.
Staying true to some of these ill-advised economic policies that Khama implemented with such strange, zeal might prove difficult and counter-productive for Masisi.
Not only will it fast-track and ensure electoral shocks in 2019 General Elections, but for his BDP, it might also prove a recipe for internal political chaos in the intervening year ahead of those elections.
Vice President, Masisi has shown an undying penchant to be associated with big ideas ÔÇô second perhaps only to his love for intellectual grandstanding.
The ill-fated ESP was his brain child.
As a minister in the presidency he micromanaged and coordinated Khama’s poverty eradication adventure.
For Masisi both schemes ended up in tears ÔÇô the ESP after it was heartlessly snatched from him when an abortive plan to demote him was afoot, and the Poverty Eradication after it simply ran aground, with millions lost and simply nothing to show for it.
But becoming president ensures that he will become both an inventor and implementer of such policies.
From the beginning, President Khama sought to alienate the middle class.
Masisi has an enviable opportunity to re-introduce the middle class into Botswana’s political economy.
If he plays his cards well, Masisi has a rare and unassailable opportunity to render the opposition irrelevant within a few months.
