It is presumptuous to assume that UDC will win 2019 General Elections. Yet behind the scenes, that is what is the narrative shaping up. People are not only celebrating but also jostling for positioning ahead of that dream world victory. They are getting ahead of themselves. Even more presumptuous is to assume that the BDP will give away state power without a fight. Power, we have to keep reminding the opposition comrades is all that the BDP has ever known. The 2019 General Elections will be won by those parties who can prove to the voter that they have what it takes to turn the economy around. It’s all about jobs, jobs and more jobs!
Trust, ethical propriety, mature leadership, stability and level headedness ÔÇô not shouting slogans are just some of the more serious things that as 2019 approaches the voter will start insist on ÔÇô much more than ever before. For now the BDP Achilles Heel remains corruption and the seemingly soft spot that that those in power have for it. Incumbency, for all the good things that come with it is also at the moment not one of the BDP’s strongest selling points. Whoever will lead the BDP into the 2019 General Elections will need to demonstrate a rare and even brazen willingness and commitment to break with the past. It will not be easy. Like the country it has led since independence, the BDP has become a prisoner of its glorious past.
The BDP rule over the last fifty years has over the years the party’s strongest sales pitch ÔÇô repeated like a mantra and with no attempt to qualify it. Whenever the party is faced with an uncomfortable situation, the party instinctively recoils into a cocoon, from where it starts eulogizing about its history and invoking its past credentials. This strategy has outlived its usefulness. And going into 2019 the party might be forced to make no mention of its past. In short the party’s past has now become its baggage. The current voter cannot relate with that past without reaching a conclusion that for them it has been a history of alienation and dispossession. One of the most difficult decisions that the BDP faces is that concerted efforts might have to be put in place ÔÇô ahead of 2019 ÔÇô to prosecute and even jail the erstwhile untouchable high-priests and fellow travelers whose allegations of corruption cost the party so dearly in the 2014 General Elections. If the BDP approaches 2019 without resolving some of these corruption related offences, the party can be assured of a bloodbath. As it is the party will need a root and branch overhaul.
Nothing short of a break with the past will suffice. The BDP is not unique in finding itself in a position where it essentially has to disown its past but also its past heroes. The British Labour Party under Tony Blair went through the same reckoning. And it was only after Blair took an emotionally sapping decision to obliterate the party’s past, including tweaking with that the party was able to win state power in 1997. That victory was a landslide that ended what had been almost twenty years of existence in the wilderness. On the other side, the UDC is hardly in an enviable position. Which is surprising given the endless breast beating and ongoing self-congratulation by some of the party’s leaders. One of the stickiest points that UDC has to deal with is the frayed relations with one its founders, the Botswana Peoples Party. BPP concerns cannot be easily wished away. There is no question that the BPP has been rudely and crudely treated at the recent negotiations. There is a deep feeling inside the BPP that their party has been a victim of the newly minted UDC that now includes the Botswana Congress party. Political unity that is mechanically conceived and artificially expedited without addressing such concerns as those already publicly raised by the BPP cannot last, except may be in ‘La la Land.”
BPP does not bring council and parliamentary seats. It never has. What it does is to bring maturity and sanity that are so much in short supply among the impatient UDC battalion that want nothing short of state power in 2019. The BPP’s enduring cool and level headedness, together with the party’s unique sense of stability espoused by their leader, Motlatsi Molapisi are attributes that none of the impatient intellectuals inside the UDC have so far been able to marshal. There are other things that UDC still has to grapple with. Persistent calls for a change of party name during the negotiations has been proof enough of powerful tribal instincts that still have to be appeased, placated and even tamed. The two positions of Vice Presidents are reminiscent of a country recovering from a civil war ÔÇô which by the way is probably how some in this motley crew of parties might be viewing their past relations with each other.
The UDC has a lot of work to do in a good number of constituencies that are held by the BDP. Unfortunately there are some in the UDC who are still wedded to a view that they can talk their way into power by addressing press conferences. In politics, especially with Botswana’s constituency based electoral system, press conferences can never be a substitute for hard work at constituency levels. That is might look like a tall order. Yet it is not all that UDC has to grapple with. Stability as we point above will prove immensely critical to the voter in 2019. A voter will not want a Government that collapses a few days after elections because people are fighting for cabinet positions. Entrenched positions exhibited at the negotiations where some wanted to be given their set of cabinet portfolios ahead of even winning the constituencies allotted to them are not reassuring.
Thus it is clear that the ongoing celebrations are not only premature, but might with time prove misplaced. In the end, to a silent voter, the two positions of VPs are a bad omen; an elephant in the room that sends mixed signals. The rude treatment that BPP received is by all accounts a red flag. Notwithstanding all the celebrations around us, 2019 General Elections remain wide open. Under the circumstances, those elections are still for anyone to win, or better still to lose.
