Some time in 1994 the country woke up to news that Botswana National Front, under that socialist patriarch, Kenneth Koma had won some thirteen seats in parliament and countless council wards across the country. It was the biggest showing by any opposition outfit since independence. For the Botswana Democratic Party, the loss of ground left a bitter after taste.
While the opposition celebrated, the BDP indolently drifted into what amounted to frantic self enforced introspection. Saving the party became both a mantra and a preoccupation. For some it became a way of life. With no time on their side they started to burn the candle on both ends. For the first time ever it seemed as if the party would lose power. That prospect of loss of power stirred unease among their financiers and benefactors which at the time included De Beers, Debswana and Anglo American.
The then BDP youth leader, Jacob Nkate bit the bullet and called for reforms. Pointedly he publicly called for President Sir Ketumile Masire’s head. Nkate’s statement opened the floodgates. It was the closest thing there was to political blasphemy. What happened thereafter had about it the whiff of Barbarians at the Gates, so to speak. Masire was a party founder who until then was virtually untouchable. An easy way out could have been to sacrifice and crucify Nkate so that he became an example to others of what became of those who dared to speak ill of the leader.
But Nkate was spared, not only because his detonation of the bomb was done in good faith but also because he simply stated in publicly what everybody else was already saying under the shadows of darkness. The BDP had started to behave like a sickly old man. And it drove everyone dead scared what would become of the family in case the old man died. Lawrence Schlemmer, a South African sociology professor with a reputation for turning around political fortunes of dying regimes was called to the rescue. The political doctor had one brief; to safe the patient, but more importantly to get them conscious again. Like a surgeon with a blunt scalpel, Schlemmer recommended painful reforms.
A good number of his suggested remedies proved too bitter even for a patient literally on a deathbed such as was the BDP. But in the end reforms were announced. Voting age was reduced from to twenty one to eighteen. There was also introduced presidential term limits to a statutory ten years. The BDP became more responsive and started implementing many of the policies long suggested by the BNF but until then spurned out of arrogance if not anything else. And the ultimate trophy; Masire announced that he would afterall be happy to retire to one of his farms after what often felt like a life time in politics. Rather than insult former Heads of State, BDP youth leaders of today should take cue from their forbearers like Jacob Nkate and openly call for reforms. Last month’s General Elections have left the BDP facing grimmer prospects than it was the case in 1994.
For the first time our history a party in power has been voted by fewer people than opposition. As one opposition intellectual recently put it, we are a country ruled by a minority. To avert further tragedy there will have to be reforms. Professor Schlemmer is now dead, but there is no doubting the fact that the medication required to keep the patient alive will this time around be far more painful than anything he could ever have imagined. Key reforms will include introducing state funding of political parties.
Long postponed constitutional reforms have now caught up with us. A new outcome of those reforms will have to decidedly usher a model that allows the sharing of power between varying establishments rather than the current where all power is in the hands of just one man. The BDP is not dead just yet, but it is a party on its last lap, which is why despite winning state power at the last General Elections, there was hardly any clatter of hurrah coming from its ranks. Rather the mood has been one of somber and despondency. It can still be saved. Reforms will also include a pronouncement on what the party intends to do with the increasingly divisive dispensation that allows for nominations at both parliament and council levels.
With the BDP now clearly headed for the opposition, like non-state funding of political parties, unless changed this is one arrangement that the party will one day come to rue. And that is not all. The party needs to tamper its love for glamour, pomp and fanfare with modesty and humility. It may sound superficial, but arrogance which has led to detachment is at the heart of pervasive malaise currently eating up the BDP.
