Umbrella for Democratic Change and Botswana National Front president, Duma Boko, has painted himself into a corner by bypassing party structures that are supposed to give him instructions.
There has been public reporting to the effect that Boko will be holding talks with the leaders of other opposition leaders in the SADC region. However, that development is being questioned by some members of both the BNF and UDC Central Committee.
“We read about that in newspapers,” says a BNF source, referring to a story that appeared in last week’s edition of Weekend Post.
According to that story, Boko has joined a platform that brings together SADC opposition leaders and will soon be holding meetings with some of them. The SADC secretariat itself, which is supervised by incumbent heads of state, has nothing to do with the forum.
A BNF source says that while there is need for opposition parties in the SADC region to come and work together in order to oust incumbent governments, the party’s Central Committee has never taken a resolution that authorises Boko to become of the SADC platform. Boko is undertaking his task as UDC leader, which position he occupies by virtue of being BNF president. As a BNF representative at UDC, Boko is supposed to present issues that reflect the position of the BNF Central Committee. The source says that in terms of established procedure, the party should have discussed the issue and taken a position on it first. Only after that would Boko present the BNF’s position to the UDC Central Committee.
“He can’t bring before to the UDC issues that the BNF Central Committee knows nothing about,” the source says.
Within UDC itself however, whose meetings are chaired by Boko himself, the issue has not been discussed.
“I know nothing about that forum because we have never discussed joining it as a party,” says a source in the UDC Central Committee, adding that he is however not surprised because Boko habitually does thing without consulting the relevant party structures. “Recently he was in Dubai but no one knew the purpose of his visit, which he was said to be undertaking on behalf of the UDC.”
The UDC is an opposition collective made up of the BNF, Botswana Congress Party and the Botswana People’s Party.
The BNF source says that the matter could get complicated where money is involved.
“If money is donated in UDC’s name towards that project, there is no process through which that will end up in the party’s coffers. Officially, UDC is not part of that project and for that reason, can’t accept any money related to a project that it has nothing to do with.”
Names that have been associated with the opposition platform for the SADC countries are those of Nelson Chamisa (Zimbabwe), Julius Malema and John Steenhuisen (both South African) as well as President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia. While the latter is no longer in the opposition, it is believed that he can offer insights on how his opposition movement managed to gain power after numerous failures. According to Weekend Post, Boko will undertake a regional tour that will take him to Zambia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Part of this effort will include consulting an expert on election-rigging in preparation for the 2024 general election.
The irony of the latter is two-fold. Firstly, UDC has not been able to convene the Peoples’ Court, a quasi-judicial forum at which the party was to present evidence to prove that the ruling Botswana Democratic Party rigged the 2019 general election. The idea for the Court came from the Botswana Patriotic Front whose founder, former president Ian Khama. The latter alleged rigging a day after the Chief Justice, Terrence Rannowane, declared the BDP as the winner. The BPF financed the project, booking conference facilities at a Gaborone CBD hotel and paying in advance. That money has now gone down the drain.
Evidence was to be presented at the People’s Court on behalf of a special group of witnesses who couldn’t themselves appear in person because that would have jeopardised their job security. These were civil servants who work for the Independent Electoral Commission as well as security officers, some members of the Directorate of Intelligence Services (DIS) and the Botswana Police Service. DIS officers, some of whom were said to be disgruntled, reportedly have detailed photographic evidence of the rigging.
However, the People’s Court was never convened because it was doomed from the get-go. Only the BNF made the election-rigging allegations while the BCP had already accepted the results. Following the elections, some UDC candidates challenged the results at the High Court but the BCP president, Dumelang Saleshando, would later reveal that his party wasn’t consulted and that the general election itself was coordinated by people who were not in UDC structures. One of them would be Zunaid Moti, a South African businessman who can be heard in an audio recording giving Boko instructions during a telephone conversation that was apparently intercepted by intelligence operatives. In the recording, Moti gives Boko detailed instructions of how a UDC march in Maun was to be conducted. While some BNF leaders denied the authenticity of the tape, the march unfolded exactly according to Moti’s instructions.
The second irony is that election-rigging has been alleged in the BNF itself by none other than BNF members themselves. Last month, there was night-time drama at the party head office in Gaborone when party members alleged rigging by a faction that supports Boko in the upcoming presidential race. Boko is being challenged for the presidency by Dr. Baatlhodi Molatlhegi. Acting on a tip-off about an alleged plot to rig upcoming elections, some of Molatlhegi’s supporters rushed to the party office in Gaborone where they found some staff members hard at work. Among these supporters was the spokesperson for Molatlhegi’s campaign and former Mogoditshane MP, Mokgweetsi Kgosipula.
Officially, the people working in the office were printing party T-shirts but Kgosipula and his company strongly believe that they were printing membership cards in order to sneak in delegates who wouldn’t otherwise qualify to vote in the upcoming elective congress. In a subsequent interview, Kgosipula said that the BNF was doing what it has accused the BDP of doing in the 2019 general election – rigging. Following these utterances, Kgosipula was suspended by the Lentsweletau-Mmopane Constituency. The suspension letter says that “your utterances of telling the whole nation that BNF is worse than BDP did not only drag the name of the BNF into disrepute but shocked BNF members nationally.”
What Boko is said to have done with regard to the opposition forum confirms what he has repeatedly been accused of by both BNF and UDC members. Two months ago, the BCP spokesperson, Professor Mpho Pheko, made the same accusation. Interestingly though, a UDC source says that the BCP is being hypocritical because when it joined the opposition collective after the 2014 general election, it was tolerant of this unilateralism because Boko and Saleshando were friends.
“The BCP only started worrying about Boko flouting party procedures when his friendship with Saleshando ended,” the source says.
