Never in its 43 years of independence has the nation been as jittery about the general election. The five yearly ritual forms the centrepiece of the country’s claim to true democracy.
The authorities exude the appearance of calm in the face of the nerves of the average folk for many of whom the election is the only opportunity to make an impression on who shall govern them for the next five years.
The authorities must appear calm. It is in the nature of the regime of the past 194 days to give the outward disposition of a regal and soldierly authority even as the people sense that democracy has taken a gruesome battering in the short lifespan of a political administration that started with the now customary elevation of a vice president to the presidency without the process of an election.
The President, as Gomolemo Motswaledi, himself a devout disciple of the democratic traditions the nation inherited from Seretse Khama, Ketumile Masire and Gontebanye Mogae, will have learnt the lesson from the recent High Court rulings that the head of state is himself outside the reach of the commoners’ law.
Whereas the Italians, who are infamous for their hosting of that notorious international mob of gangsters better known as the Mafia, believe that the leader of the country must, like all citizens be subject to the law of the land, the highest courts of Botswana hold otherwise about their head of state.
The Appeals Court judges effectively put the President of Botswana beyond the law.
What then, if the president should steal ostriches? What if the president should claim ownership of islands of land by crooked means? What then, if the sitting president should commit adultery? What then?
What then, if the President should fail to declare elections or allow himself a few days beyond the mandatory five years at the helm of government?
What then if the president should start to abuse elected officers, in or outside government, setting up parallel administrations everywhere where the people have elected their own? What then if the head of state should begin to populate the civilian administration with men of the force?
What then if the head of government should habitually acquire for himself presidential caravans, a vice presidential army guard, and limitless state funding to get rid of a few rats at State House and then to build bunkers such as the type where Adolf Hitler committed suicide with his beloved wife?
These are all new questions for the largest population of Batswana. The citizens are not used to asking awkward questions. That is why they may be nervous.
They are unsettled, as Isaac Mabiletsa of the opposition Botswana National Front suggests, that the decided day of the election, 16 October, has been designated ‘an unpaid holiday’. It appears that the employers at the Botswana Confederation of Commerce and Industry and Manpower or BOCCIM, are also nervous that they will lose out on one day’s man hours of labour.
The trade unions are equally confused about the implications for their members under the circumstances where election day is an unpaid holiday. The teachers union at BOSETU, having recently won a High Court decision, understands that its members are not required in law to serve as invigilators of examinations, so they will go and vote without running the risk of offending the law.
What is less certain is what will happen to the vote of the students who will be writing examinations on that day.
The head of the Independent Elections Commission though, is dead certain that there will be no special dispensation for the students. “Those who write in the afternoon will vote in the morning, and the students who write in the morning will vote in the evening,” says Gabriel Seeletso.
“The polling station will be open until 7 o’├ºlock in the evening, and if the students are in the premises at closing time, they will be permitted to vote”.
What then of the police and other government officers who were scheduled to vote last week? “The commission has decided that they will vote on the 16th. Means will be made to see to it that if they are assigned to elections duty, they will be stationed as close to where they have registered as possible. The commission is currently working out the logistics,” says Seeletso.
It still remains a mystery though, that a defect in the ballot papers should only have been noticed on the eve of the appointed day for elections officers to go and vote. It in fact took a trip by the director of the IEC to physically visit South Africa to ensure that what they had ordered is what they will get!
Needless to say, that raises yet another set of questions, one of them being: “If Botswana can produce ballot papers for Zimbabwe, why should it have to go to South Africa to produce its own?”
The questions and answers, on paper, look fairly straightforward. It is especially important for the authorities to give the impression that everything is on course, and that there will be no need for yet another declaration of a state of emergency in order to bring the elections process back on even keel.
Such a dramatic undertaking would be out of character with the image that the new political administration wants to project; the image of a disciplined nation marching in tandem towards election day, to do the inevitable by voting the ruling party back to power.
But perhaps, it is the very fact of the dramatic events to which the citizens have been exposed in the six months of post Mogae rule that have raised the expectations of the voters about the potential impact they could make at the 2009 general election.
The popular view, one suspects, is that no state of emergency could be more dramatic than the combined effect of the banning of braais at butcheries, establishment of constituency leagues next to the Botswana Football Association programme, the passing of a Media Practitioners Act, stringent regulations for nightclubs, bars and bottle stores, hiking of charges for traffic offences, the threat to tertiary education scholarships, militarisation of the civil service and cabinet…the list is long enough to drown any civilian democracy.
Perhaps, that is why the nation is on nerves end about the prospect of losing the vote that will permit it to make a statement on 16 October.