The discussions at Tsholetsa House in the weeks and days before July 14, 2001 always narrowed down to the ferocious infighting that characterized the relationship between cabinet and the backbench.
The BDP administration staffers were worried by the damage the ugly stand off was causing the party.
They had watched with anguish and despair as the push for mediation by influential personalities, like party founder Goareng Mosinyi, floundered.
All interventions to prevail on the backbench to smoke the peace pipe and stop humiliating the President had come to zilch.
Rather than bring about reconciliation, such interventions seemed to whip up hatred and intensify feelings of ill will.
More than anyone else, administration staffers felt the frustrations keenest.
At the Central Committee meetings, they watched in full glare as factionalism played out; with inter-personal relations getting sour, confidence collapsing and trust flying out through the window.
To underscore the extent to which factions and factionalism had become the modus operandi inside the BDP, many years later, President Festus Mogae would admit at a party National Council that it was “common knowledge” that the BDP had been bedeviled by factionalism and infighting for many years.
While Mogae did not invent the BDP factions, they became entrenched and grew a new set of teeth during his tenure.
It was during Mogae’s presidency that perceptions of exclusion and annihilation found expressions.
It all started when, shortly after the 1999 General Elections, Ponatshego Kedikilwe, then National Chairman of the Party and past master of parliamentary debate and government policy, resigned his cabinet post in protest.
His demotion to the back benches effectively thrust him into the position of spiritual leader of a young but increasingly vocal back bench that was more determined to take the war to the executive and embarrass the President.
Faced with a defiant back bench, Mogae became a worried man.
Everything about his government was falling apart.
There was no missing the disorderliness and discordance that characterized his party and government.
Here was a BDP government, helpless as for the first time in history it found itself publicly held ransom by its own Members of Parliament.
“The relationship between the cabinet and the backbench Members of Parliament leaves much to be desired,” the tormented Mogae reported to the Party Congress at Palapye on July 14, 2001.
“I have no peace as there is currently constant negotiation between me and the back-bench. The back-bench feels that perhaps I do not realize that they put me into power. I want to say here and now that I am acutely aware that I owe everything political that I have and what I am to them and that I understand fully well that we stand and fall together,” said the clearly distraught, anguished and powerless President.
Owing to differences with the President on their salary increases, Members of Parliament had, as a result, just thrown out of hand a Bill seeking to increase salaries for the judiciary.
The President told the Congress that he agreed with the “cabal” that cabinet ministers and Members of Parliament were underpaid, but felt that “we cannot afford much more than we are getting.”
The opposition looked from a distance with lightly subdued excitement, relishing every moment as paralysis consumed not just the party in power but the executive as well.
The President’s helplessness against his party’s MPs was all the more deafening.
“I am fully aware that the MPs, both former ministers and the cabal of some new MPs and the rest of the House can make and unmake me politically. It is my hope, therefore, that this matter of salaries and allowances for MPs will be resolved and that the present impasse whereby MPs hold the other pieces of legislation to ransom is discontinued.
While the President’s hope and wish to resolve the remuneration impasse was honoured, the same could not be said about the MPs’ discontinuing their unconventional and unsavory bargaining tactics.
The backbench, made largely of a new crop of members of parliament, seemed eager and more determined to push back the boundaries of independence and reassert the autonomy of parliament from the executive.
Under the spiritual guidance of Kedikilwe, the young Turks disagreed and in many instances rejected outright almost every policy paper cabinet tried to bring before parliament for approval.
Talking to anyone who would listen, the BDP back-bench never tired of pointing out that President Mogae was the root of all the problems.
His unfairness in cabinet appointments became a rallying cry, whipped up as evidence of conspiracy to shut out a section of the party.
Factions aside, Mogae’s government had been suffering from an unfortunate series of poor judgment by the leader, as when he left Daniel Kwelagobe out of cabinet after the 2004 General Elections fuelling suspicions of deliberate unfairness.
In a very big way, the decision to exclude first Kedikilwe and then Kwelagobe from cabinet contributed in no small measure to a growing sense of disrespect for cabinet in general and for the President in particular.
The decision stoked emotions of hatred and confirmed the long held suspicions that a conspiracy existed to annihilate the duo.
Things came to head when the two took the President by surprise and started calling on him and his government to do away with the provision for specially elected members of parliament and councilors as the arrangement was used to strengthen the ruling faction.
At about the same time, complaints about the President’s inaccessibility became a mantra.
His fondness for off the cuff outbursts became a burning platform.
There were even accusations, wantonly thrown about of state surveillance, spying and eavesdropping on members of parliament perceived to be anti government.
To validate their concerns, the back bench argued that the reason why ministers were unable to effectively implement, defend and pronounce government policies was because the president had appointed weak acolytes into positions of authority.
To push the envelope further, radical MPs began to feed the storyline that untutored in the BDP traditions even Mogae was himself not up to the job.
As if the difficulties with the backbench were not enough, cabinet was itself porous and divided, infiltrated by ministers sympathetic to the recalcitrant back bench cause.
The cabal, as President Mogae casually called them, was made up of ministers who had made it their habit to systematically leak government secrets, including to an excessively excitable press that gleefully splashed the fodder as front page news.
“Cabinet itself does not speak with one voice, not only on this issue but on many others. There are apparently members of cabinet who routinely divulge what is discussed in cabinet to members of the back-bench. This has the effect of exacerbating the strained relations between members of the Cabinet and members of the back-bench. In Cabinet, we have spoken about the undesirability of this practice several times to no effect,” said the exasperated Mogae.
To underscore the divisions in the party, he went on to tell the Congress that he had spent most of the previous night trying to reconcile different factions from the Youth Wing, Women’s wing and bring peace to the then feuding Kgatleng Constituency.
Even after the Palapye plea, near violent differences persisted.
Aware of the shift in power dynamics and buoyed by a display of helplessness by the president at the Palapye Congress, the increasingly powerful back-bench dragged him to a party caucus where they demanded an apology for having called them a cabal. Henceforth, the BDP back benches unashamedly created and thrived on conflicts with the executive.
Assured of their power, the back-bench were to often resort to what amounted to blackmail as when they boxed the president to apologise at a party caucus for having used the Palapye Congress to call them a cabal.
Annoyed by the MPs’ use of blackmail as a bargaining chip, Mogae recently summoned the national television crew to his office and told the nation that BDP members of parliament were behaving like uncastrated young goats in a new kraal. He said the MPs were angry at him for refusing to give in to their blackmail.
As late as this year, when some semblance of unity had come back to the BDP, President Mogae was still nursing some grudges and wounded egos.
He complained of rampant individualism and attempts to play to the press gallery.
“An MP cannot denigrate, ridicule, disparage, malign, vilify, revile and cast aspersions on the BDP and still expect the electorate to return the party to power. The belief that one can do just that and be seen as being a fearless defiant exception from the stupid government crowd is willful self decent and delusion,” he said.
He accused the MPs of playing to the press gallery.
As a parting short during his last address to the BDP Congress as President, Mogae compared BDP MPs to a “bull in a China shop.”
“To expect that it is acceptable to speak ill and vulgar about our party during the week and then don its colours at the weekend and sing its praises hoping to persuade other people to vote for it is simply na├»ve and unrealistic,” he told the delegates.
His address at the Molepolole Congress came in the wake of yet another tempestuous run with Members of Parliament. Try as he could, the President would not hold back biting words for his Members of Parliament.
Not for the first time he accused them of trying to blackmail him.
“It would be inexcusable, in fact intolerable, for any member of our party however important they may consider themselves to be, to behave like a bull in a china shop and destroy the very policies on which the BDP roots are anchored.”
