After a long season of dithering, Botsalo Ntuane has announced that he will after-all be availing himself to be elected Secretary General of the Botswana Democratic Party.
He said he had met President Ian Khama out of courtesy to discuss the issue.
“I did not go there to seek permission. He is the party leader and I felt it was courteous to share my plans with him before I made a public announcement,” Ntuane said.
Sunday Standard can confirm that prior to this meeting, Ntuane had written a letter on the same subject to Khama.
The letter was neither replied nor acknowledged.
But since then Ntuane has been under pressure to make known his plans.
He has also been approached by almost all candidates for the position of Chairman, all of them trying to persuade him to be in their lobby list.
He has so far spurned all such advances, saying he prefers to work with whoever becomes Chairman.
“I cannot stop people from putting me on their lobby lists. But my attitude is that I will not endorse anyone.
Rather I am open-minded and will serve whoever wins,” he told the Sunday Standard.
While he has had a tempestuous relationship with the BDP, Ntuane currently enjoys sizeable goodwill inside the party.
It remains to be seen how he intends to tackle BDP inspired policies that once drove him to leave the party and create Botswana Movement for Democracy.
One such policy, of which he was an unwavering critique is the Alcohol Levy which President Khama has implemented with religious zealotry.
There is a belief in the party that he has sufficient institutional memory to turn the party around.
This is based on the current hiatus that the party is going through, subjected to by all kinds of impelling by the buoyant opposition.
