Batswana yearning for political change were disappointed when the meeting of the opposition parties broke up in disarray last December because of differences over how best to share out parliamentary constituencies. While the BMD took the rap for the collapse of the talks the BCP, BNF and BMD are getting sucked into the maelstrom of blaming each other for the failure of the talks. However since every cloud has a silver lining this article argues that there is an aspect of the Umbrella which was successfully unfurled. The Joint Technical Teams of the four opposition parties charged with the responsibility of ‘integrating’ the policies of those parties pulled off what is by all accounts a political miracle by coming up with a set of progressive policies whose overarching philosophy they described as ‘the Social Democratic Programme’. That programme is like a prism through which the best policies of the four opposition parties are refracted. It preserves the integrity of each of the four parties. What is even more striking is the relative ease with which this feat was achieved. A comradely and collegial atmosphere characterized by a spirit of give and take prevailed throughout the negotiations. Indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that everything was plain-sailing with the debates and discussions proceeding fairly swimmingly.
I had the honour and privilege of being asked to be part of what was originally supposed to be a three person BNF team on that committee. Each party was represented by three people. As it turned out, the BNF was represented by two comrades, Comrade Monageng Mogalakwe and myself. When the third person and the substitute failed to turn up for reasons best known to themselves we felt confident enough to represent the BNF. And represent it we deed. On that Joint Technical Team there was a sufficiently broad range of skills and expertise to carry out this task. Off the top of my head I remember that there was a sociologist, a banker, a linguist, educationists, a gender activist, a journalist, a lawyer, to name but a few.
The following series of articles are my personal reflections on how this miracle was achieved, its processes, procedures and outcomes. I have decided to publish these articles mainly because the average rank and file member of the opposition parties and indeed the average citizen is still in the dark about this historic achievement. Hopefully the publication of these article will help resuscitate the Umbrella which is too important to be allowed to fail. Understandably, in some quarters concern was raised about the fact that this important exercise was shrouded in too much secrecy or dominated by a tiny elite and that the general public – the supposed beneficiaries of this project were reduced to passive bystanders. Long after the Joint Technical Teams had successfully ‘harmonized’ the policies the blanket of secrecy over this achievement essentially remained in place. I personally thought that all the opposition parties committed a monumental error of commission or omission by failing to publicize and talk about the milestones they had achieved, apparently until the entire project had been concluded. Alliance politics are predicated upon the principle of talking more about the things that unite us, and less about those that divide us. The milestones on the policy front should have been deliberately hyped by the spin doctors of the opposition parties in a bid to make them the launching pad for the entire project.
Before I delve into the subject let me point out that even before the first meeting of the Joint Technical Teams took place some Umbrella skeptics within the BNF were already murmuring predictions that this project was doomed to failure. Some were quick to dismiss the BMD as too closely aligned with the BDP to be able to do business with the BNF. Other umbrella skeptics even made fantastic claims to the effect that the BMD had no policies! To be very honest, when I was asked to join the Technical Team my first instinct was to say ‘No! Merging the policies of the opposition parties, particularly the BNF and the BMD did not seem to be within the realm of possibility. Surely that must be mission impossible! I said to myself. With the benefit of hinder sight we also tended to exaggerate the differences between the BNF and BCP. I then said again to myself, if Joe Slovo of the Communist Party in South Africa was able to sit down and negotiate with the National Party of the apartheid era why can’t the BNF negotiate with fellow opposition parties in Botswana? I also had the fear of not wanting to be associated with policies that could be conceived as a betrayal of the BNF. However, I did not verbalize these misgivings, instead I decided to knuckle down to the task assigned to us. The result was a big pleasant surprise of just how much common ground exists between all these political parties.
It must be borne in mind that all four parties had previously secured the green light from their respective party congresses to negotiate the Umbrella initiative. If all comrades understood the elementary principles of democratic centralism no dissenting voice was supposed to be heard in the public until the project was pronounced officially dead. It is my assumption that those congress resolutions still stand even after the failure of the December 2011 meeting of the four parties.
All parties have expressed a willingness to go back to the negotiating table if fresh proposals are put forward. Any one member of the four attacking the Umbrella publicly is in breach of organizational principles of democratic centralism which bind the minority to always abide by the decisions of the majority until the party or the majority officially declares that the idea of forging a multi-organizational united front in the forthcoming elections has failed. The Umbrella project which allowed parties to maintain their individual identities was essentially trying to implement Trotsky’s slogan of the united front ÔÇô ‘marching separately’, (i.e. as BNF, BCP, BMD and BPP) ‘but striking together’ (through the Umbrella structure meant to concretize and operationalize the notion of ‘a multi-organizational united front’ that the founders of BNF long dreamt about ). It is difficult to understand how this arrangement could threaten the integrity of any of the parties involved. In the BNF the tendency for the minority not to respect the views of the majority seems to be endemic.
The question is what was the effect on the negotiating teams of certain party elements, dissidents and loose cannons publicly attacking and rubbishing the Umbrella idea while the negotiators were engaged in the sensitive business of courting their counterparts? During the early part of our work the first such loose cannon was a high ranking member of the BMD who took a swipe at the whole project. The BMD members of Joint Technical Team were clearly embarrassed. For a moment it seemed as if BNF comrades were going to ‘behave’ themselves this time around ÔÇô at least that was the perception of one BNF activist who gleefully said to me, ‘this time the BNF is behaving itself’. About two weeks later several BNF dissidents were up in arms vilifying the BMD and dismissing the Umbrella as unworkable. The effect on us on the negotiating table trying to implement the party congress resolution to talk to other parties was not only embarrassing but had the potential of scuttling the talks. All parties must reign in such unruly malcontents. I do not condone the denial of the right of comrades to express themselves. In my view comrades should be free to express themselves while the resolution is being implemented only by engaging in polemical debates on, for instance, the merits and demerits of various models of cooperation in order to try and shed light on the talks. This is not the same thing as attacking an idea endorsed by your party congress and, worse still, attacking some of the very parties we are trying woo to the Umbrella multi-organizational united front. The Joint Technical Team survived this whirlwind thanks to the level-headedness of the team which stayed focused on the task at hand.
In my view the common political platform is an indication of the fact that if all us were squarely focused on the big picture rather than jockeying for position, especially in the event that the Umbrella comes unstuck, we can work together for the common good of the struggling and toiling workers and poor peasants of this country. More interventions by institutions of civil society to try and breathe life into the Umbrella and break the logjam are certainly most welcome. In the ideal world a common political platform is supposed to be the alpha and omega, the be-all and end-all of alliance politics. Once a common political platform is reached everything else must fall into place. However, in the real world we knew that talks were always going to stand or fall on the sharing out of constituencies. The situation is not helped by the current elitist first-past-the-post electoral system which encourages candidates to opportunistically claim virtual ownership of constituencies thereby complicating the negotiation process. Under proportional representation this problem will cease to exist because the whole country will be a single constituency. The talks collapsed because some comrades prepared for marriage and divorce at the same time.
As part of our modus operandi we identified 19 major policy areas or sectors which we wanted to try and ‘harmonize’. The policy areas were later increased to 20. Each party was then tasked with the responsibility of summarizing its policies pertaining to those 19 or 20 sectors and given a word limit in order to cut down on unnecessary frills. Subsequently, using a laptop Comrades Otlogetswe and Letebele of the BMD took turns in putting all the summed policies of the four parties on a single grid which made it easy to compare and contrast them by reading across what each party says on each of the 20 policy areas. For instance, one would be able to compare and contrast the policies of all four parties have on, say, Agriculture, simply by reading them off across on the grid. Comrade Pansiri from the BCP voluntarily pulled out the common themes from the grid thereby further simplifying our task. The policies were then discussed and debated one by one and what was agreed upon was thrown into the box for ‘merged policies’ on the same grid. Each member of the committee generated what they thought were common themes. Policies were easily agreed and adopted if they cut across all four parties. Other suggestions would be debated, amended and either adopted or rejected if they were too party specific and were not shared by other parties. Decisions were taken by consensus.
