Saturday, November 2, 2024

Opposition ideology is absent

With everything to benefit from a joint campaign, opposition parties have forfeited that opportunity, opting for an individual Olympics. None of them, it seems, ever bothered to look in the mirror because they would have long discovered that none of them possess the physical attributes of the great Hercules.

While sharing a similar ambition ÔÇô to wrench power from the ruling party ÔÇô opposition parties have not shared a common ideology. This ‘similar ambition’ amounts only to booking parliamentary jobs for the individual parties. Ideology suggests a world view; a picture of the shape and content of the ideal society. The ‘ideology’ seeks to outline the strategies and tactics that will be used by the organisation to achieve the envisioned society. The ideology describes the sort of people who will do the work ÔÇô the organisation ÔÇô that will take the larger society to the ultimate ideal.
This understanding of ‘ideology’ means the one thing in common that the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) and the opposition Umbrella parties have is the absence of ideology. BDP is excused, perhaps. Comrade Moore writes in Mmegi of 2 March 2012: “The BDP is a party that originally represented the interests of the colonial ruling classes, the white settler bourgeoisie (farmers and industrialists, traditional ruling classes or chiefs, cattle barons and the emergent petty bourgeoisie ÔÇô newspaper reporters, court clerks and teachers.

“Both Masire and Seretse were cattle barons. The BDP was dependent upon white financial support in Britain, South Africa and southern Rhodesia and from the white settler bourgeoisie. In Kweneng West, one Afrikaner businessman contributed funds to the BDP campaign.

“The BDP was reported to have received 5,000 British Pounds from the Bechuanaland Meat Commission.
“K.T. Motsete of the BPP charged that the BDP received substantial amounts of money from the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief and the white inhabitants of the country. This committee is funded partly by the British government”.

Moore concludes in part: “Close scrutiny of the two constitutional conferences that gave rise to our constitution indicates that it is the embodiment of the interests of the dominant capitalist classes, the so-called eight principal tribes and the dominant gender group”.

The fact of Seretse Khama being the king of the BaNgwato helped to tie up the conservative chiefs, the rural women, elderly men and the small community of the educated. Domkrag and the opposition leaders of the time ÔÇô Motsamai Mpho, KT Motsete and Phillip Matante ÔÇô shared a disdain for communism. Whilst the BDP gained from this polarised vision by committing itself to America and Europe in the Cold War, the opposition forfeited the opportunity to benefit from the Soviet Union.
Former South African president, Thabo Mbeki, writes in The New African of March 2012: “It is my firm view that … the Soviet Union, and therefore the socialist perspective, occupied a strategically stronger position in terms of winning the allegiance of liberated Africa.

“This was essentially because: in terms of Marxist ÔÇô Leninist ideology, the assertion of the right of nations to self-determination, up to and including independence, was an essential part of the perspective of the global advance towards the victory of socialism; and, viewed in its context as anti-imperialist, the Soviet Union saw the anti-colonial movements as a strategic ally against its own opponent, imperialism and the imperialist powers.

“The historical reality is that certainly many, and perhaps the majority of the African political forces that had been involved in difficult struggles to achieve liberation from colonial domination could not but be attracted to an anti- imperialist posture, which was sympathetic both to the ideas of socialism and partnership with the Soviet Union, the then leading socialist country”.
Could it be that Botswana was not “involved in difficult struggles to achieve liberation from colonial domination” for reasons Comrade Moore alludes to above? That the transition to independence was planned from London for execution by the Botswana Democratic Party?

The original Peoples Party brought with it from South Africa, not just contempt for communism, but a perception of politics constrained by the idea of Pan-Africanism as articulated by Robert Sobukwe, though born out of Kwame Nkrumah’s Peoples Convention in Ghana which delivered independence from the British.

Motsamai Mpho would have been of the African National Congress ilk, guided by the famous ‘Freedom Charter’ whose authorship is attributed to the South African Communist Party in some quarters, perhaps including the Sobukwe faction of the ANC youth league of the time.

The Peoples Party, in its early and later forms, missed the boat. They made enemies in abundance; the Afrikaners, the Communists, Domkrag, whites and their own shallow but vibrant brand of Pan-Africanism. In the newly arrived Kenneth Koma, they found yet another enemy, a wily not-to-be-trusted Soviet groomed communist. His suggestion of a united front, founded on the basis of a voluntary association of organised adversaries of the BDP and neo-colonialism, was rejected, and Koma resorted to the Botswana National Front made up mostly of dissidents of the older parties.
The guiding document of the organisation would be Koma’s Pamphlet No 1, a product of academic work in the Soviet Union, and as socialist a document as one could get in an underdeveloped, semi-feudal society of some 300,000 people in a territory of about 220,000 square miles in Africa.

The document recognised the need for state intervention in the delivery of education, national security and other life sustaining responsibilities of government such as provision of water and housing. Eight pieces of elaboration on the main statement in Pamphlet No1 followed, one on ‘Education in (Black) Africa’ and another on’ Chieftainship in Crisis’, each one dedicated to specific political and social problems as they emerged.

The idea of the ‘Front’ was workable only with Kenneth Koma at the helm, in the earlier years guiding from the vice-presidency and later as president. In effect, he was always the president.
The Front was a compromise political solution to the proposition of a United Front. As a result, it became an amalgam of ‘patriots, radical democrats and progressives’ whose main purpose was the achievement of the ‘minimum programme’ of the organisation; to remove the ‘neo-colonial’ government of the BDP. The maximum programme remains a mystery to this day.

In practice, the ideas of the BNF were a fudgy concoction reflective of the various ‘tendencies’ of the recalcitrants of the BDP, BPP, the Botswana Independence Party, the BDP, the Federal Party and the self-appointed ‘Left’, many of whom claimed to be products of Koma’s study groups.

They are well read. They write well and they are well spoken, most times. Some were rewarded well for waking up early to wish Kenneth Koma ‘Good Morning’ at his village home even if it was afternoon. They became parliamentarians, councillors and mayors on account of that display of their political capabilities. Koma was ideology, organisation and ‘The Front’. An ardent fan and respected trade unionist, Johnson Motshwarakgole, made that point, much to the chagrin of Koma’s timid critics. “Koma is the Front, and the Front is Koma,” he said.

In Koma’s absence, a remodeling of the Front to meet 20th century demands became impossible. All this was possible because Koma was adept at manipulating the ‘competing tendencies’ – communists, socialists, traditionalists, capitalists, democrats, malcontents of the BDP and various others ÔÇô to bring the voters close to that middle point where they would believe that the BNF might actually win power, whilst also accepting the inevitability of eternal BDP rule.

The ‘front’ model was well suited to unify diverse nationalist groupings that wanted independence from the colonialists. It served the nationalists well in mobilising the social groupings that were disgruntled with the colonial past, but it did not have an agreed solution, or vision of the future.

It was only natural that, with or without Koma’s alleged ‘cultist’ tendencies, the unfulfilled ‘tendencies’ within the Front would from time to time opt out to form The Workers Front, Freedom Party, PUSO, Botswana Progressive Union, Labour, Liberal and the Botswana Congress Party whilst the less enterprising groups formed ‘concerned groups’ and other ‘Platforms’.

The new Social Democratic Programme of the BNF was more a critique of Pamphlet No 1 ÔÇô an act of theoretical defiance ÔÇô than it was an announcement of a fresh vision, or an exhortation to new means of struggle. All in all, there is precious little in the stated policies or ‘programmes’ of the off-shoots of the Front that are distinctively different from the mother party’s agenda, or Koma’s understanding of things.

It is this very deception that gives the undiscerning observer the idea that there are no major ideological differences between the Front, BCP, Botswana Movement for Democracy, BPP and others.
What appears in theory to be the absence of ideological conflict turns out in reality to be absence of ideology. How then, can there be ideological conflict where there is no ideology? It seems fair to say that the Umbrella talks were never really about opposition cooperation. Rather, the Umbrella talks were about how to distribute jobs for the aspirant parliamentarians in the various opposition parties.

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