Following a comprehensive loss in a by-election over the weekend, the ruling Botswana Democratic Party is in a state of disorientation.
The party is sliding into a comatose. Already it is numb following a series of defeats ÔÇô five by-elections on a row since after the October General Elections last year.
The BDP finds itself in an altogether new territory.
It is however not too late yet for the patient to recover. But first they will have to show a willingness to swallow the bitter medication that is needed.
President Ian Khama should not wait for 2019.
He should go as early as now.
It matters a lot that BDP attitude towards reforms has been to be non-committal.
At a recent Congress in Mmadinare, the party deliberately skirted around key reasons why they performed badly.
Bulela Ditswe, the party’s internal primaries was made a scapegoat.
There was not a single big idea to come out of that Congress.
This is instructive.
Everybody inside the BDP knows very well what the problem afflicting the party is. But out of fear and self-preservation no one dare say it out.
The Biggest problem that the BDP has is Ian Khama.
That makes him the most prized weapon inside the opposition armour.
And for as long as he is BDP supreme leader, the party’s fortunes will continue to plummet.
When he arrived into politics, it seemed there was nothing that Khama could not do.
Inside the BDP there was no shortage of people who genuinely believed he could instruct the heavens to open up for rain, and the rain would pour down.
Many secretly compared him to Jesus the messiah ÔÇô the son of God who could also walk on water.
The opposition was literally running away for their dear lives.
For the BDP those were the best of times.
Those days are gone, probably for good.
The by-election in Barolong at the weekend was in every measure a referendum on Ian Khama.
The results of that referendum have proved once and for all how Khama’s aura of omnipotence has now been shattered.
By rejecting Khama’s anointed successor in Eric Molale, the people of Barolong have effectively rejected Ian Kama. Khama must be feeling Molale’s loss keener than the candidate.
Molale’s loss is Ian Khama’s personal defeat.
There has always been an understanding that the BDP was on decline.
But a defeat over the weekend presents an altogether new set of reality.
Where he was once the messiah, Ian Khama is no longer the person to save the BDP.
He is the party’s supreme problem.
This is the time for him to go. He has failed.
And somebody inside the BDP should have the balls to say this to his face, very much the same way that Jacob Nkate, then a BDP youth leader, said to the then President Sir Ketumile Masire.
While Masire listened and then quietly left the scene, Khama is unlikely to go.
He would rather take the party down with himself.
He still thinks he is of some use to the BDP.
With Mompati Merafhe gone, and Molale vanquished over the weekend, there is not a single soul inside the BDP that meets Khama’s criteria to be a suitable candidate to drive his agenda.
By seeking to have Molale as his successor, it is clear that he very much wants to rule from the grave.
The BDP is however not the only party in trouble.
At the Botswana Congress Party, it doesn’t rain, it pours.
The BCP is now on a freefall. And I say this with heartfelt diffidence.
Thankfully for the BCP, they now have Kentse Rammidi as their most powerful courtier.
Potentially Rammidi might yet change the BCP fortunes.
That is if he takes them wholeheartedly into the UDC.
It is him on whose hands the future of both the party and its leader now depends.
Rammidi won the position of BCP Secretary General on a ticket that was brazenly pro-opposition unity.
After the party’s shocking drubbing at Barolong, the BCP must now be looking up to him to rescue them from the dry land on which they currently sit.
Only Rammidi can deliver the BCP back into an era where they could once again be relevant.
It will not be easy.
But armed with irrefutable proof that the party’s past grandstanding does not work, Rammidi has a blank cheque with which he might just re-write history.
We are all holding our breaths.