Saturday, February 8, 2025

The opposition has squandered a gracious opportunity

A few days before Christmas a most unhappy catastrophe befell this country; opposition attempts to fight the next general elections as one officially collapsed.

Not for the first time hubris, self-interest, arrogance and exaggerated sense of self importance had won the day over humility, sacrifice and modesty.

I cannot recall any time in our recent history when so much has been promised only for so little to be delivered.

After the Botswana Democratic Party split for the first time in its fifty-year history, all the ingredients of change were in the air. It was time for regime change, so to speak.

All the major opposition parties were led by a new generation of politicians, all of whom were different from their predecessors who had dismally failed to work together.

Unlike their predecessors, all the three of them; Dumelang Saleshando, Duma Boko and Gomolemo Motswaledi had no interest in staying forever in opposition, and to add the cherry on top, the BDP could only be defeated with the direct participation of those who had emerged from its womb, so we were told.

With hindsight, we should have started suspecting yet another false dawn the moment a blissful honeymoon preceded the marriage.

Personally, I have felt deeply dismayed and revolted by the collapse of the talks, not so much because I had not expected it as that all the ingredients were there but never taken.

There used to be a time when the public was quite willing to pardon the opposition for these kinds of failed opportunities.

On this latest mishap, one has a feeling that the public may not be as forgiving not least because there was a lot to play for after the public hopes were raised too high.

From the look of things there was no requisite leadership provided for those who represented the parties at the talks.

Initially marketed as a national project, once the talks started and hard decisions had to be made, sectoral interests and personal friendships were allowed to creep in and replace principle and national interests.

For example, there were constituencies that could not be given to certain parties because other parties had already allocated them to individuals deemed too important not to contest.

The BMD in particular played the role of a spoilt child brought up in a wealthy family, perhaps a result of their past association with the BDP. Their shiftless position just fell short of demanding other players to contest under the purview of the new upstart.

I’m still to fully grasp the real reasons behind their pretensions to the throne, given their short history which has not allowed them enough time to go into the trenches and get a real test of their popularity.

That said, not everything was the direct fault of BMD intransigence and a bloated sense of indispensability.

While in the end they grudgingly gave away much more than they could ever have hoped to justify to their membership, for their part BCP wasted the early rounds of negotiations grandstanding and frivolously competing for attention with BMD.

The BNF’s major undoing was to try to assume the role of a kingmaker ÔÇô and a bad one at that, often playing the BMD against the BCP while masquerading as a voice of reason.

I had hoped that the long and warm relationship between BCP’s Dumelang Saleshando and the BMD’s Botsalo Ntuane, which endured even as the two were in opposing camps including at the university would serve to be a power for good. That was not to be.

The relationship between the two drastically changed once the two men found themselves sharing the opposition space. It was then that their competition against one another started to degenerate into near cannibalism.

Their private briefings against each other and against each other’s party which bordered on the rancid have served to poison, contaminate and provide combustible fuel to an already explosive mix.
These are the two people who at an individual level I think should be held personally liable for the collapse of opposition talks. In equal measure the two men rendered the whole project into a charade, to use a word liked by one of them.

At another level, one realizes that the Botswana Democratic Party has declared an open season against opposition parties. The ruling party is busy celebrating the collapse of opposition unity talks. That to me is as silly as it is ill-advised.

Has the BDP become a better party as a result of opposition failures? I do not think so.
Has the BDP achieved an additional scalp under its belt as a result of opposition missteps? I doubt very much. As a country we are all the poorer for it.

If anything our troubled opposition guys should consider the BDP taunts as a compliment.
Other than to underscore a reluctant acknowledgement of the potential power of opposition unity, the gleeful but misplaced celebrations at BDP also serve to highlight the fact that the BDP is woefully aware that it no longer is a party that it used to be.

These days victory at the polls is no longer a given – not even for the mighty BDP.
For the opposition though, the tragedy is that every time attempts to cooperate fail, any future efforts at that become even harder.

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