In a big way, President Mokgweetsi Masisi has addressed many of the concerns that had for long made Umbrella for Democratic Change supremely relevant for many people.
That has kind of denied UDC the much needed oxygen.
The upshot of which is that the UDC is now walking at a precipice.
By any stretch, this is not something to be celebrated.
One of the biggest coattails the UDC had been holding on to had all to do with former president Ian Khama’s popular disapproval.
With Khama gone, the UDC now has nothing left to hold on to.
The party is sailing perilously too close to irrelevance.
A decision by the UDC leader, including at one point to call himself Khama’s lawyer has not helped matters.
It has exposed just how out of touch with the public mood the UDC has become.
If ever there was any doubt, a recent public statement by the UDC effectively criticizing what the public felt was a long overdue arrest of Isaac Kgosi cemented the extent to which UDC had become irrelevant.
If the UDC does not work hard and fast, they are headed for a crash.
And that is not in anybody’s interest.
As a country we need a strong opposition.
Sadly even in parliament, UDC performance has been at total variance with public expectation.
There has clearly been little or no coordination between and among Members of Parliament.
Owing to that lack of coordination, the party’s potential firepower based on the known resources and abilities of and also their numerical strengths have remained just that ÔÇô a dream.
After the General Elections in 2014, people had big hopes for the UDC.
To say those dreams have been shattered is to make an irresponsible understatement.
The long wait by the public that one day UDC will come to its senses and wake up has been usurped by the arrival of Mokgweetsi Masisi.
It is the nature of human kind to look forward to something new. People like to have expectations.
They like to have hope. And they like to hang on and look up to something as an expectation.
For now Masisi provides himself as an embodiment of such hope.
UDC fanatics will violently differ.
Blinded by their radical fealties, for them Masisi is a fake creation of a media desperately flapping around for a hero.
May be they are right.
Masisi-mania might yet prove a false dawn. And it is possible that like the UDC itself, Masisi’s aura will with time dissipate into thin air.
But still it is the UDC that we should be more worried about.
The party simply does not seem to have a Plan “B.”
It is all chaos.
UDC media and public engagement s are nowhere near what they used to be, which is rather surprising when looked against the fact that Botswana Congress Party; a one-time media savvy political formation has since joined UDC.
May be the UDC might yet defy all the laws of gravity, but for now doubts abound about the true value that BCP has been to the UDC.
At the BCP there is also no shortage of activists who are genuinely and not without a reason justifiably worried that joining the UDC, at a time of such massive political unrest for UDC was a bad decision.
Their concern is that the UDC, ever in a self-injuring mode has contaminated the brand of near puritanical serenity that they have worked for over twenty years to build, nurture and cultivate.
Coming to think of it, the weakening of the UDC is indirectly behind the chaos at the Botswana Democratic Party.
With no external threats, the BDP warlords are turning their guns within. They have done that on numerous occasions in the past, reaching fever pitch during the time of Festus Mogae.
BDP activists do not like to stay idle for too long.
Cross party dynamics do matter.
For BDP activists the absence of external threats is a call for internal showdown.
They want action ÔÇô all the time. Hence what we are now seeing.
The shortest route to ending the civil wars at the BDP would be to re-create the UDC ÔÇô if that is a task possible under the current climate.
