You know the BDP is in trouble when the people that once deserted it to form another party are now literally lining up for leadership positions in the same party against which they not only turned their  backs but also ridiculed as an old dinosaur that was about to go extinct.
We learn that Phillip Makgalemele wants to become the BDP Secretary General while Samson Moyo Guma wants to become the National Chairman. Other lesser men and women are mentioned for other jobs that form the Central Committee.
The name Botsalo Ntuane has from time to time cropped up ÔÇô at one point in reference to position of Secretary General, in other instances as the deputy. Whatever the case, all these three men have at one point or another been associated with Botswana Movement for Democracy. As the founding interim chairman and later deputy leader, Ntuane is by any account a BMD architect.
But so has been Guma, who served as BMD interim Treasurer General before throwing tantrums and tracing his footsteps back to where his political career was sired.
Of the three, Makgalemele is perhaps the most pardonable, at least in theory. Together with Patrick Masimolole he was at BMD for a little longer than two weeks, before heading straight back to the BDP lair, a feat that has to his discredit since attracted him a label of the country’s most unpredictable politician.
The fact that all these men are even being mentioned as potential candidates for serious positions at the BDP serves one important purpose: It is a revelation, not so much┬á of untamed ambition burning inside them┬á ÔÇô even as that too starkly stands out – as about the dearth of quality inside the party that runs this country.
If returnees are given such big positions in the party executive, just where are the loyalists that stayed put at a time when BMD led by Ntuane, Guma and Makgalemele turned the BDP on its head? Does it mean that of all those that stayed behind none are good enough to become Chairman or Secretary General of the governing party?
These are important questions that if not properly answered have the potential to once again marginalize the BDP to outside the realms of seriousness.
There are still many red coals of discord smouldering beneath the façade of BDP unity.
If the BDP does not adequately address the issue of returning carpetbaggers it has the potential to destabilize the ship.
When upon his return Makgalemele was made assistant minister, many legitimate questions were asked about the appropriateness of his appointment. “It looks like we now have to show some disloyalty to the party for us to be rewarded with a cabinet post,” one backbencher told me at the time.
The issue of┬áwho of the leading candidates are in the BDP’s coming congress is a prime exhibit of all that is cynically wrong with the BDP. The party lacks a broad-based intellectual discourse that is to be expected from a party that has been in power for close to two generations now.
When was the last time the BDP produced a policy discussion document?
One has to go far into history to come across such a document.
Because the party has no intellectual base of its own they are all too happy to adopt  and talk about government policies that started at civil service level as if they had been originated by the party.
While this may be a result of blurred lines between party and government, it also is an implausible alibi for intellectual degeneration that has taken root across the entire party structures.
There might be piecemeal bits that have over time gradually trickled down as part of election manifestoes and occasional presidential pronouncements at various party events or public lectures, but as far as we can recall, the governing party does not have an economic blueprint, not on trade, not on  international relations and certainly none on such important and emotive matters such as land. Even where such bits exist they are disparate, fragmented and generally lacking in coherence.
Whatever policies there are on these key areas belong to government and have not been internalized at party level, including not by party’s future kings who we now learn are queuing up for top jobs in the Central Committee.
Just how could anyone seriously take the BDP as a party of the future in a future world where ideas and intellectual capital are set to replace commodity resources as income earners for prosperous nations?
The answer to that rests with what quality of new leaders the governing party is able to produce.
