Stories emerging from the BDP Central Committee meeting held this past Monday have left many shocked, more surprised and even traumatised by the latest turn our democracy is taking under the leadership of Ian Khama.
The President has dropped a political bombshell.
He has issued a directive that going forward no one serving or aspiring BDP Member of Parliament shall at the same time be allowed to contest or hold a party position in the Central Committee.
That, of course, exempts the President himself.
It’s been interesting listening to the party Executive Secretary, Batlang Serema, vaguely argue that it’s just a lobby. It’s the language of denial if not trickery.
Khama never lobbies. He has never had to, not inside the BDP.
Both inside the party and government, Khama wields what is by all accounts untrammeled power.
With so much power at his disposal, his word is cast in stone; it either becomes a law or, at the very least, a policy.
Worse, recent history shows that the man unashamedly uses that power whenever he feels like it.
Indications are that Khama’s tactics have sown the seeds of division.
There is a genuine panic among BDP members of parliament and other office bearers.
What exactly is Khama trying to achieve?
That is the question on everyone’s lips.
May be he has genuine intentions to pull the party and the entire country behind him.
The reality though is that BDP is a deeply divided party. And such crude inventions which only hoard all the power to himself and his favourite acolytes can only leave the party more divided and polarized than was the case when he inherited it.
The situation is not helped by the fact that there is an entrenched belief inside the BDP that for anyone to succeed in their career they have to suck up to Ian Khama.
That belief, unfortunately, is spreading farther and farther afield into the professionals in the public and private sectors.
Having made his position known on this latest issue, henceforth every lackey will be outdoing itself in its eagerness to do what it thinks will please the President.
Thus the “lobby” will without any public debate or scrutiny become a law.
Sycophancy, it seems, has now become the most commendable instrument in Botswana.
Only a nation that has lost its hold on reality can allow that so much should in the end depend and rely on just one man who is, in the final analysis, unelected, untested and, ultimately, unaccountable.
God help us!
We are headed for a one-man dictatorship.
The tragedy of it all is that Botswana’s electoral system does not allow for a direct engagement between the President and the voter.
This, despite the fact that the President has so much power that he literally controls everything under the sun as seen.
Having seen the reach of Khama’s power and his readiness to expend it inside both the party and government, I have come to a conclusion that we need a system that allows for the direct election of a president.
It’s high time every political official, most especially the president, ascended their office by virtue of an election.
I cannot think of any other leash with which the voter can control what is an exceedingly powerful president such as what we have.
Thankfully, some more shrewd and discerning BDP members are growing edgy that somehow events are fast spiraling out of control.
The many BDP members I have talked to this past week think Khama has this time gone too far.
They are worried by the man’s growing levels of personal insecurity, not to mention his obsession with peripheral issues that have got nothing to do with running a country that is going through a dark cloud of economic uncertainty.
“The situation was much better during the days of open factional warfare,” one party member said to me.
That said, the good thing about Khama’s latest initiative is that it will swell the number of voters who have already fallen out of love with the BDP.
Believe it or not, ours is an inherently flawed democracy.
Khama’s latest behaviour is not so much different from presidents in countries run by a one party-system.
To save ourselves, some aspects of our electoral system have to change.
It’s time the President in particular derived his power and sustenance directly from the people.
If that does not happen we are headed for a situation where the BDP will form a government even as it would have garnered less than 50% of the popular vote.
And that, if I remember well, is exactly what happened in Zimbabwe.
And we cannot now call it democracy!
But ultimately, the BDP as a party has to ask itself some very serious questions: Why is it that so much power is increasingly and systematically being heaped on the hands of just one man? How can it be that one is allowed so much room to literally micromanage the lives of so many people? Is it just coincidence that since April last there has been an extraordinarily high number of disenchanted BDP members?
