With election fever now reaching its peak, the question that comes to mind is that of how best our political parties can be financed as a way of enhancing the vibrancy of our democracy but also making the playing field more even. Once again politicians, especially from opposition have been reduced to begging. The disparity between ruling party and opposition parties is obscene.
It is a stark reminder of the uneven field on which our politics are predicated. The uneven playing field is a stark reminder of just how unsustainable our democracy is. It is our view that left unchecked for much longer this disparity will breed feelings of ill-will, jealousy and unnecessary bad blood between opposition and the ruling party.
That is what anybody aspires. As Batswana we have to always remember that our success as a country is in no way on account of one party at the exclusion of others. Rather it is a result of all of us. The current atmosphere is further soiled by increasing narrative that the intelligence services are channeling money and other public resources into the coffers of the ruling Botswana Democratic Party. This has not been conclusively proven but all indications are that it is not an altogether outlandish suspicion given the absence of oversight and monitoring. But by far the biggest threat to our democracy is the foreign owned businesses whose links to the governing party are shady at best and outright corrupt at worst. It would be better for our democracy if these businesses, for a greater part owned by Asians stayed out of our politics.
Their involvement in as far as they exclusively support one party against others amounts to meddling. And that is intolerable and should be condemned in the strongest language possible. We must point out that these businesses are owned and controlled by people who originate from countries that have no developed cultures of democracy, including China. When any democracy can be traced as in the case of businesses owned by people of Indian extraction, it is very clear that the owners are themselves still trapped in the ancient caste system that arranges humanity into manmade strata of inequality where ordinary citizens are expected to defer to authority regardless of how wrong those in power can be.
Under their culture, these business owners simply do not understand how it can be that anybody would want to challenge the ruling party for state power. That kind of thinking, we want to point out is alien to our thinking as indigenous Batswana. It also is altogether foreign to what the founders of this country’s had in mind when they opted to take a path of multi-party democracy when almost all of the African countries opted the routes of single party democracies and outright dictatorships in the 1960s.
Call us xenophobic if you want, but we make no apologies in our observation that companies from Asia and to a lesser extent the Middle East are in a very big way contaminating our democracy and dragging this country behind by literally putting our corruptible leaders into their pockets. Being the chief beneficiary of this deformity and absurdity, there is no doubt that the ruling party likes it that way and would want it to remain that way because this uneven playing that manifests itself with public finances being used to indirectly benefit an incumbent party in power means that the BDP’s hegemony remains unchallenged.
It is for that reason that all attempts at putting a debate into the public discourse on funding more equitable ways of financing political parties through state coffers have been quashed out of hand. We call on authorities to seriously look at ways of nurturing our democracy by coming up with more equitable political party funding. But before that happens we call on foreign owned businesses operating from this country who make their money through trading among all Batswana, including with government to evaluate the morality of using those profits to finance one political party against the others.
We want to remind these businesses that their actions are a recipe for hatred, resentment and deep-seated roots of antipathy for which they will one day be forced to pay in a manner that will lead them to say they are being singled out because of their race. And they would be wrong because it has nothing to do with race. Rather it is all about parochial short-termism that will with time inevitably prove counterproductive and self-defeating.
