There is a strong feeling that government has been using the State of Emergency and the cover of Covid-19 to ramp through a number of policies, laws and procurement deals without proper debate and scrutiny.
Not enough evidence has so far been adduced on allegations of corruption.
But government too has not been able to effectively rebut what little evidence has been brought forward.]
The result is a stalemate. But suspicion endures.
The biggest victim has to be parliament.
Parliament is fast shifting away from being custodian of individual civil liberties to being a rubber stamp of executive.
In the just ended session of parliament, the ruling party’s strategy was not to debate and persuade but rather to bully, threaten and use numbers to rush through some of the most important bills.
From the look of things, the situation in parliament will get worse before it gets any better.
The Botswana Democratic Party has a clear majority.
Their size of their majority is unassailable.
Ordinarily this should make them secure and allow them to behave rationally and with some measure of generosity.
Yet that is not what we are seeing. We constantly see a party behaving like its consumed by a siege mentality.
The BDP is not using these neither for good nor to build consensus.
Instead it uses that majority to show us how brute force works.
This makes policy formulation difficult. In the end policy instability is inevitable.
The key man in all this is Vice President Slumber Tsogwane.
In both his hands, Vice President Tsogwane who is also BDP Chairman and also leader of the house wields two large sticks and no carrot.
He is deliberative and ruthless.
He does not differentiate between a BDP member of parliament and opposition member of parliament.
Any deviation is viewed as an act ultimate disloyalty.
Anyone stepping out of line is whipped back with a similar merciless contempt.
Tsogwane is fast defining the role of a VP in Botswana. and with that also proving wrong those who had sought to undermine him thinking he was wimpish, unsure and hesitant.
He’s showing himself to be a Masisi ideological twin – only much slicker.
While his own star might be on the rise, the same cannot be said of parliament as a platform for deliberation and accountability.
He seems to have his eyes on winning all the battles on behalf of his party – at all cost, one might add.
How he achieves that and at what price is for him not important.
That, of course is dangerous.
Supplementary budgets of amounts running into billions are systematically rushed through parliament – with little debate, no scrutiny and even less consensus.
BDP invariably always sail through, demonstrating their might – but also impunity and hubris.
Like a colonial policeman tasked with enforcing native order, the vice president sits in parliament all the time, keeping watch over others and enforcing discipline, standing up to speak only when a senior opposition member is proving difficult for everybody else.
I watched the late Mompati Merafhe in parliament when he was vice president and Leader of the House. On his day he could be ruthless herder of members. But it was easy to buy peace with him using even the most banal flattery. He carried out his assignment with a combination of humour, sometimes maturity and sometimes ruthlessness.
He never sought consensus – was instinctively contemptuous of opposition but was actively cultivating flattery, including from them. He would from time to let sleeping dogs lie.
With Tsogwane it is a one-way street. He is rigid. And almost to a hilt, he sees the world in black and white.
But he is the closest there is to Merafhe.
Tsogwane’s loyalty to the president is absolute.
When it comes to defending the president, Tsogwane always wants his be the final say.
For him it is always pure politics at play.
It’s all or nothing.
Every passing session of parliament the vice president reveals himself to more people. You underestimate him at your own peril.
He never wants to give even inch. He is dogmatic and shiftless in his defence of the state – for him personified and embodied by the president.
Of course, this personality has its strengths and its weaknesses.
Those who underestimate Tsogwane are always caught by surprise.
But he too is unable to ever see merit on the “enemy camp.”
Parliament should forever be the custodian of our democracy.
Everybody elected into the house brings with them the weight and dreams of those voters who brought them there.
What we are seeing amounts to sacrilege.
“No government can change the men’s souls – the souls of men change governments,” Ronal Cartland a British politician and writer once said.
The BDP in parliament should be careful of their acts. They could be fast-tracking their party’s removal from government.
