Seven years ago, a political observer said the trouble with Botswana’s entrenched politics is that it comprises a ruling party that has ruled for too long and a fragmented opposition in a constant state of victimhood.
This week as the public service workers strike stretched beyond one month and opposition parties marched to the beat of the same drummer, you would be forgiven for thinking the analysis referred to another country ÔÇô certainly not to President Ian Khama’s Botswana.
Pressure has intensified on the president to provide some direction to the current crisis. At the increasingly militant gatherings of the striking workers across the country, the cry for regime change is ringing out.
The alliance between the unions and the opposition ÔÇô which critics within the Botswana Democratic Party refer to as a marriage of convenience ÔÇô now threatens the BDP’s 45-year grip on power.
Certainly, it has dented the BDP’s image as the steward of one of Africa’s success stories.
A diplomat commented to The Telegraph this week that the days when the BDP saw itself as invulnerable ÔÇô much like Achilles without the heel ÔÇô are over. On the same social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, which helped topple Egypt’s and Tunisia’s leaders, Batswana are calling on the president to resign. Botswana is clearly at a cross roads.
Opposition leaders are preying on the situation, with head of the Botswana National Front, Duma Boko, rallying Botswana to replicate the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.
“There are different ways to take over governance, and that includes by force,” he said at a recent press conference in support of the strike held by the opposition parties. “If we can come together we can take our government as it happened in Egypt and Tunisia.”
Gomolemo Motswaledi, leader of the Botswana Movement for Democracy, said the strike has cast doubt on the BDP’s claims that Botswana is a model democracy. “This is clear from the government’s refusal to accept workers’ demands for a pay hike, under the pretext that the economy has not yet recovered from the recession,” he said.
The opposition’s comments have found great play in the international media, with a string of reports that Botswana’s aura of democracy is wearing thin. For years, the story that the country is a beacon of democracy has been an international theme, endlessly told.
Zibani Maundeni, a lecturer at the University of Botswana, says the strike, and the manner in which opposition parties have fed into it, has cast domestic politics in a new light. Now opposition parties can count trade unions as a constituency.
“Opposition parties are now openly involved in labour issues,” Maundeni told the news agency AFP. “The workers have also struck a relationship with the parties. But it remains to be seen how this relationship will work in future.”
President Khama’s has angered the unions by insisting that they could very well strike for five years if they want, but they will not get the 16 percent (now adjusted downward to at least 13 percent by the unions) they want. His handling of the crisis has led analysts to reach into the past, recalling his handling of a demand for a salary increase by members of parliament during his time as Vice President. He infamously derided the MPs as “vultures”.
To critics of the ruling party, who believe the BDP is now a shambles, the current events, allied to the fall out that led to the formation of the BMD, show that Khama’s actions are in keeping with fears about his leadership style when he was being lined up for the presidency.
In the debate surrounding his appointment as Festus Mogae’s Vice President, Khama’s detractors feared that as president of the BDP, he would turn out to be a domineering, even vengeful party boss. They feared that Khama would turn the BDP into a personal fiefdom and run it like a control freak. The fissures that led to the BMD gave them the satisfaction to say “we told you so”.
In assessing Khama, his critics said what fires him up is the schooling he received in his years in the army. To that he has added an unshakable, deep-in-the-belly sense of his own rightfulness. He has often been accused of stirring animosities, both within and outside his party.
“One of the opposition’s main criticisms of the BDP is its lack of intra-party democracy,” said one opposition politician as the debate concerning the fast-tracking of Khama into the Vice Presidency swirled. “An organization with repressive internal controls will roll out that culture beyond itself.”
Khama’s critics say to understand his psyche, one only has to reflect on comments he made during a CNN interview: “You may be aware that before I entered politics, I was in the military and it had not actually been my intention to make politics a career.”
The president has subsequently told kgotla meetings and political rallies that he detests politics and never wanted to be a politician.
Thus it is Khama the reluctant politician, who rather than opt for the broad-based consultation of democracy, is more inclined to give the orders that the army general in him is more comfortable with, who has been cast into the role of head of state, say his critics.
As the crisis surrounding the strike has grown, paralysing public service delivery and tearing at the country’s peaceful fa├ºade, there is growing unease within the BDP itself.
“We cannot pretend that the strike had no effect in our country. It did. Up until that point the world trusted us totally as a nation for stability,” read a post on the party’s Facebook page.
Indeed, the BDP accuses the opposition of undermining that stability by exploiting the strike to try to spark a north Africa-style popular uprising. And while the strike has given the opposition parties a new voice, it may not necessarily bring them to power. “The fact that opposition parties are sympathising with workers does not mean a weakening of the BDP,” said UB lecturer and political analyst, Zibani Maundeni.
For the unions, the current strike is in one sense an ace up their sleeve. It is the first time that workers have been able to strike legally, with the unions having won a battle to get bargaining power for themselves, rather than being recognized as associations. ?This emerged from the new Public Sector Act last year, introducing a negotiation process and granting unions the right to strike. The unions immediately took the chance to convert workers’ anger into an impressive show of worker’s power.
The fifth week of the strike opened with intentions by leader of the opposition, Botsalo Ntuane, to mobilise opposition MPs and even backbenchers of the ruling BDP, to call for an urgent parliamentary meeting this week to try to end the strike. “We are in an undeclared state of emergency,” Ntuane said.
