Our nation is in deep slumber, a slumber from which we must awaken and arise to our responsibility of building a sound tomorrow. Our nation is at a standstill. These are the years stolen by the endless tiffs within our party, the ruling Botswana Democratic Party. These are the years of missed opportunities ÔÇô opportunities for building a glorious tomorrow for generations to come.
Two of our contemporaries in the BDP, Mr Botsalo Ntuane (the Gaborone West-South Member of Parliament) and Mr Kabo Morwaeng (the former – member of the BDP central-committee), along with Advocate Sidney Pilane (a former senior aide to the President), face the prospect of suspension or even expulsion from our party. It is a prospect precipitated by an apparently discreet investigation, lodged by our leaders to unravel the role of the trio in an extra party dialogue, a dialogue conceived to forge the passage to parliament of the deposed Secretary General of the BDP, a deserving young statesman whose parliamentary run for the October 2009 elections met a dead-end, unfairly threaded by our party’s leaders.
Once again, whether or not our colleagues are suspended, these are extra ordinary circumstances in which our party system seeks to disadvantage or even punish more of our leading young luminaries, for their deep and robust understanding and practice of the democratic process, at a time when our party should have been focused more on its mandate to uplift the lives of ordinary people. To accept any form of unfair treatment on party members, a contagion inflicted only on young promising leaders, is to abdicate our responsibility and obligation to nourish the value system that is at the core of our past success as a nation.
We do agree that any set of leaders, face the burden and weighty responsibilities that come with the mandate to govern. It is them who must contend with difficult decisions, which at times should be taken at the expense of popular sentiment and dissent; It is them, who are privy to vital information which may not be readily available to ordinary citizens, and which information had we access to, and perhaps had we been in the same positions as our leaders are in, we too may have arrived at the same decisions.
It is indeed our leaders who must account for all eventualities that strike our land. This is why citizens often render to leaders the benefit of doubt, and this is why citizens render their trust, reverence, and patience when they deal with leaders. It is a magical process of the great modern and traditional democratic process, on whose stage our nation has always danced. It is true, that if our leaders take difficult and unpopular decisions, it does not always make them worse people than the people we are; after all, the decision-making privilege is an entitlement afforded by the democratic process.
Our party’s leadership of the day has expressed a determination to instill discipline within the party, at all levels of the party. It is a resolve inspired by what appears to be the disintegration of our moral values and of our authentic African ways, especially among our contemporaries, and the younger folk. The force and frequency of our merry-making has, like a hurricane, blown away our sense of productivity and responsibility. It is a climate that others argue, is not always best resolved by democratic means and processes. In fact, some go as far as to propose that we are in a moral famine, whose ravaging sting requires the intervention of a benevolent dictatorship. Our leaders are aware of these pockets of sentiment, and they may or may not have considered these sentiments in their management of party and country.
Most fair-minded members of our party and indeed all fair-minded citizens of our nation ÔÇô we call them “our movement” – understands and appreciates the constraints within which our party’s leaders must govern, and their entitlement to their views on how best to govern. We understand their sense of responsibility to exercise what they believe is their mandate to deliver prosperity and discipline in particular.
Our movement also understands that the democratic process at times means we must swallow, painfully, decisions, even where we disagree with our leaders. But our democratic tradition also allows individuals to differ with our own leaders. Our brand of democracy allows individuals to express dissent without fear that someone will sign a note that crushes fruits that our talents and drive bear, or squander all the hope and faith we have in tomorrow and in our nation, or batter away the peace our friends and family have enjoyed since they were born.
In extraordinary circumstances, such as when we feel the very marrow of our success is being drawn from us, our traditions allow democrats to communicate and canvas goodwill beyond the confines of our party, with all citizens, including with other political parties and other formations. Indeed this is what our movement did and what we are doing and what we had assigned Mr Pilane, Mr Morwaeng, Mr Ntuane and others in our movement when we asked them to solicit support for capable potential specially elected members of parliament.
Matters of national interest necessarily require political parties, communities, workers, herders, professionals, intellectuals, crasftsmen, musicians, pastors and individuals of differing persuasions to commune together at the table of national interest. It is a privilege if our people commune in this way, an honour, an act of immense discipline, a generosity of heart and a patient faith. If this is what our party leaders seek to discredit us for, then we cannot stop them, we will not stop them, but they will never take away the sanctity of our communion with values and ideals we so dearly believe in.
This is a right that members of any party should have, and in our case, the judicious exercise of which we are immensely proud. In many democracies it is common practice for members of a party to vote in unison with members of the opposition, especially where national interest is at stake. In many instances mature and fair-minded legislators belonging to one party seek endorsement from opposition members, to facilitate the passage of important pieces of legislation. In our view, this represents a hallmark of a functioning democracy. Indeed this had been the vision of our party’s founders, whose democratic values we still hold on today. The ensuing suspension, isolation, intimidation and labeling of dissenting voices in our party, contravenes the robust brand of our democratic tradition.
If our leaders are faithless to this robust brand of democracy, it is not always because they are wrong. Perhaps their style of democracy is different from our own concept of democracy. Still, the traditions and values of our party bind our leaders to allow other members of the party, such as ourselves, to be as different to them in our views as we deem right. In an open and free society, this is a minimum standard by which those who govern should be held.
The deep and decisive streak with which our leaders seek to isolate our capable young leaders is, in our opinion, bordering on the ruthless. To remain silent and to proceed as if this is normal or desirable, is an act of denialism under whose weight our party and country could collapse. This is extraordinary. These are extraordinary times that require vigorous, steadfast, yet principled, faithful and patient response.
We are aware that some critics feast on the idea that our movement is a constellation of radicals, rabble-rousers, over-ambitious, bitter and defiant young people, who are bent on undermining the current leadership. These cynics wish to sell a currency that gives the impression that we are disorganized and lack the support of BDP branches or the BDP youth wing.
According to the critics, we are absorbed in personality clashes, we command no sound policy co-ordination, we possess no commitment to serve our nation determinedly and exude no sense of balance or maturity nor do we emit any ounce of vision. That is how the democratic process should brew – individuals should be allowed the space to analyze and criticize our movement as vigorously and incisively as they are able to. Of course, in the end, our infinite faith is in this nation, to fathom the wisdom to discern if we are being true to the interests of the country or not.
In fact our movement belongs to everyone ÔÇô it belongs to the teachers, farmers, workers, pastors, young and old professionals, artists, garden-workers, herders, public servants, entrepreneurs, professors, nurses, doctors, artisans, the unemployed, the sick, old men, old women, tellers, the weary, servants and chiefs ÔÇô these are the people who are the pulse of our movement. Their voices, fears, hopes, faith, talents and their encouragement is the fuel that combusts the movement’s locomotive.
Our movement is a demonstrably broad church of principled, dedicated, visionary, tenacious and disciplined young and old democrats who yearn to serve the nation of their first love. It is a movement that cherishes and appreciates the goodwill of our nation and the support of many ordinary, honest and fair-minded citizens, within and without the borderlines of our party.
Chaired by either the Secretary General of the party or by someone delegated by the Secretary General, our party’s Policy Forum is supposed to be a platform via which the party can brew and assert policy direction independently of Government. At a time when it may have been necessary to assert new policy direction or policy-refinement, the unfair banishment of our secretary general also meant the environment to extol or offer our policy positions became toxic at the expense of many ideas that had been, and continue to be, crystallized in response to what ordinary citizens wish to see their country become.
Far from focusing on party personalities, our movement has invested immense energy on conceiving possible social, economic and governance policy contours, independently from Government, that could be enacted to provide the thrust our nation needs to become a great and successful nation. We intend to provide a very brief fore-taste of our thinking on policy issues in the coming weeks, God-willing, and provided the newspapers are kind enough to publish our brief policy contours.
We intend to disseminate a fore-taste of our broad thinking, to demonstrate that our movement believes that the time is now, to recalibrate and refine ourselves for the next push, even as we understand that our ideas or blueprint are not and will not be perfect. And these represent not just our ideas, but our reading of the picture many ordinary citizens wish to paint of our nation for the future. The banished Secretary General of the BDP, Gomolemo Motswaledi, and Ndaba Gaolathe, intend to release the joint policy synopsis statement soon, not as members of the BDP, but as ordinary citizens representing the views of many other ordinary, fair-minded citizens – our movement.
Despite urgent policy issues and matters for debate, we find ourselves embroiled in an endless “quarrel” with our party’s leaders. What should have been a democratic dialogue or contest of ideas has degenerated into a quarrel. Our people will lose faith in us, unless we find a way to upgrade this quarrel into fruitful dialogue.
The options to upgrade the quarrel into fruitful dialogue are there for all to see, and it is our responsibility to exercise these options before this nation punishes our negligence and lack of resolve. At the same time it is necessary for our movement to exercise patient faith in all its endeavours.
We are witnessing, by the current quarrel, a time and period that we are handing to be “eaten by the locusts”. It seems, also, this is period in which we are also plunging our nation into debates that focus on the past. These are times that cause us to borrow words from an American statesman:
“We think the people of Botswana expect more from us than cries of indignation and attack. The times are too grave, and the challenge to urgent, and the stakes too high to permit the customary passions of the political debate. We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through the darkness to a safe and sane future. If we open a quarrel between the present and past, we shall be in danger of losing the future”.
The quarrels cannot and should not go on forever. Our movement faces a decisive moment. It is not about what our movement has the power to do or not to do for and with our nation. It is about what our times need, and what the people of this nation yearn for, going into tomorrow. A new beginning, an awakening and the rising of the sun is in the hands of the people of Botswana, a new horizon about which a wise leader once said – we can once again have “faith in each other’s purpose, hope in each other’s future and charity towards each others’ shortcomings”.
