The BDP is dead! Long live the BDP.
We have now comprehensively passed the 45 year mark since the Botswana Democratic Party was first elected into power, 1st March 1965.
The next elections are due in 2014, most probably October of that year, by which time the BDP would have been in power for 49 years – uninterrupted.
Forget about the party’s shrinking mandate, what matters most is that across the world few political parties are known to have held power, continuously, for a longer stretch.
And through the ballot, one might add.
A friend from our college days likes to talk of Mexico where a similar political juggernaut ruled non-stop for 70 odd years.
I refuse to even start to imagine we have to brace ourselves for a possibility of having to break one such objectionable record.
The consequences would be terrible, given the current regime’s impatience to institutionalize corruption and abuse of state power.
The net effects of BDP’s long reign are there for everyone to see.
Psychologically and mentally we have become a one party-state.
Generally speaking, we are unhappy with the way we are governed, but we seem all the most helpless to do anything about this one-track existence.
Given the power, outreach and influence of the BDP, the wealth, patronage and largesse at their disposal, which they always ruthlessly put to bear to ensure their stay in power, it is never clear how on earth this party would ever be out of power any time soon.
The occasional rancor of protest is welcome, as that currently occasioned by the still buoyant BMD, but just how enduring will it be?
There seems to be a terrifying lack of faith that this country can live for a day without the BDP.
For many of our people, other than BDP, there seems to be no point in belonging to anything else.
While people are right to be nauseated by Phillip Makgalemele and Patrick Masimolole’s recent vacillations, the truth of the matter is that even greater souls are just as enamoured, if not more so.
I’m still to come to terms with just how it has been that people we used to look up to as formidable academics, scholars and intellectuals have shamelessly taken to chanting Ian Khama’s name as a part of their therapeutic meditation.
One only has to look at the team of luminaries assembled by Pelonomi Venson to help save the BDP to appreciate the depth of our predicament as a nation.
Makgalemele says after ditching the BDP, he could not sleep a wink for the three weeks that he was a BMD member.
After those sleepless weeks he went straight back to the BDP groveling and swearing never to repeat his sins.
For him BDP membership is the only thing that a human being can ever hope to be. How tragic!
It’s very easy for me to accept Makgalemele’s explanation – lame as it is, not least because I have always regarded him as a man of straw with no firm principles. Unfortunately, I find I cannot say the same about many of Venson’s dream team.
The behaviour of these people makes it difficult for me to see how different we are from China where the only party anybody can belong to is the Communist Party.
That said, the truth of the matter is that no political party would have won election after election for as many times as the BDP unless it struck a tune that somehow deeply resonated with a profound national sentiment. That is an important fact we have to grasp.
It is high time our analysts grappled with the true reasons behind BDP’s hold on power.
We cannot all lazily attribute that stranglehold to “creativity” as President Ian Khama so vainly persuaded us to do at a recent BDP retreat.
Officially speaking, in Botswana there is no state funding of political parties.
But as we know that rule does not apply to the ruling party. The BDP is the only party that is directly funded from the public coffers.
Other than that the BDP is for most of the time sustained by a money laundering racket with close ties to public finances, it is not a secret that the State President, the Vice President and their cabinet underlings all have access to state resources which they unashamedly harness to prop up their party.
For this class of politicians there is no difference between political party and public function.
If the BDP wants to raid an opposition backyard, as they did last month when they attacked Guma Moyo in Tsamaya, state resources in the form of two helicopters, tens of vehicles and a state of the art jet are enlisted.
One only has to go to Tonota North where a by-election is due next week to see how, in the name of incumbency, state resources are used to bankroll the BDP campaign, while depressing and frustrating opposition. That looks like abuse of office to me!
With so many odds against them, opposition parties naturally have to spend infinitely greater amounts of resources than the ruling party to be able to attract the same number of votes.
The issue of political party funding has to be seriously interrogated.
This is meant not only to enrich our democracy but also to render the playing field even.
With no access to state money that is currently the exclusive realm of the BDP, not even the amity that seems to be currently holding between opposition parties in Tonota North, where they are engaged in an informal “no-aggression treaty” can ever be enough to win an election.
Put bluntly, as long as only the BDP is financed by Government to run its campaigns we can set aside the dream of any other party ever winning state power.
This begs the question of whether our elections are in any way fair as they are said to be free.
