Students of history on the liberation movements of southern Africa will be conversant with a non-aggression treaty that Mozambique signed with South Africa in 1984. It was the height of bad faith and double standards that very much characterized political madness of the time. At the signing ceremony Mozambique was represented by Samora Machel while PW Botha represented the apartheid regime of South Africa. All evidence shows that Samora Machel signed the agreement under duress.
In fact Machel had sleep-walked into the deal with his hands tied behind his back, so to speak. He was fighting a losing battle against the South African backed Renamo guerrillas who wanted to topple his government. Machel’s hope, misplaced as it turned out to be, was that signing such a deal would somehow weaken Renamo by cutting aid and other supplies that were flowing from their South African benefactors. It never happened. Instead the sole beneficiary of the agreement turned out to be the apartheid regime as Machel, true to his word shut out the ANC freedom fighters from using his country to stage attacks into South Africa.
For their part South Africa covertly identified third parties who continued to bankroll Renamo more than ever before. That Mozambique/South Africa treaty was to be called Nkomati Accord. It was an act of brazen bullying and wanton blackmail by the apartheid regime. If Nkomati had worked in Mozambique, the South African regime had plans of reproducing it across other southern African countries including Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia. That would have enhanced the regime’s overreach across the sub-continent. In every essence what the BDP wants Elijah Katse to do is a direct replica of Nkomati Accord ÔÇô with all its trappings of abuse, bullying and blackmail.
In this analogy, the BDP so capably plays the cameo role of the apartheid regime of South Africa while Katse best encapsulates Samora Machel’s constricted Mozambique. The BDP wants Katse to renounce all his claim of legitimacy as the party’s parliamentary candidate in Tlokweng and cede such claim to Olebile Gaborone. As an act of ultimate humiliation, the party further demands Katse to do that in writing. They also want Katse to demonstrate his support for the party’s hand-picked replacement; ostensibly by publicly endorsing and campaigning for the handpicked Olebile Gaborone. And that is not all.
Additionally, the BDP also wants Katse to put it down in writing that having waivered all his claim to legitimacy, he will henceforth not seek legal recourse against the party. Not surprisingly, the BDP conveniently does not spell what its obligations to Katse will be going forward, save for vague and implicit blackmail that pass for a guarantee that appending his signature to their version of Nkomati Accord will save him from expulsion. Not only does the party leadership want Katse to sign away his rights, they also want him to endorse an otherwise illegitimate opponent. It does not get any more crudely ruthless than that. An ideal situation, the party contends, would be a re-run. From their correspondence, the BDP says Gaborone’s coronation is a defective option force fed unto them by the fact that elections are about to happen.
This is as disingenuous as it is dishonest. If it is deemed so late to conduct a re-run so much so that they want to coronate Olebile Gaborone, why would the BDP not find it palatable to continue with Katse as a candidate (for all his alleged indiscretions and misdemeanours) given the amount of time he has already spent as the party’s defacto candidate in Tlokweng? It may sound like red herring, but Katse was always living on borrowed time. For those who have any idea how Gaborone ended up at BDP, it was clear even after he had lost the BDP primaries that he would in future, re-emerge as a Member of Parliament ÔÇô under one incarnation or the other. To be fair to Gaborone, this has little to do with the fact that he is a Gaborone, or more to the point that he is a royal as some have sought to explain what is at play. Rather it has everything to do with the circumstances under which he came into the BDP when he turned his back against the Botswana National Front.
Gaborone defected to the BDP through direct and personal efforts of President Khama, with no intermediary involved as is so often the case with many other carpetbaggers. What history lesson the BDP however needs to learn is that while Samora Machel expelled some one thousand ANC activists in return for South Africa extraditing the same number of Renamo guerrillas, nothing much changed on the ground. The civil war in Mozambique raged unabated and even got worse. Events in Tlokweng will continue ÔÇô not because of Katse having signed the BDP’s latter day Nkomati Accord (which he is unlikely to do on account of the now deep mistrust he has for the party) but rather in spite of him signing it. Katse or no Katse, Tlokweng was always UDC’s to lose.
