“Four legs good, two legs bad. Four legs good, two legs bad.” This Orwellian maxim which I first learnt at Shashe River School in the 1980s very much sums up how the media in Botswana tries to characterize the BDP against the opposition clutter. It is a lazy generalisation that has not taken us anywhere. If anything it serves to pull under the carpet the many acts of incompetence that have conspired to make opposition parties in Botswana irrelevant as to look unelectable in the eyes of the only person who matters ÔÇô the voter. The media is doing the opposition a great disservice. The Snowball dictum kept crossing my mind this week after a colleague forwarded to me a crudely drafted letter that untruthfully stated that Spencer Mogapi is the enemy of the Botswana Congress Party.
I have not the slightest inclination to engage with the writer, save to acknowledge and admire their blind loyalty to their party but also to reiterate that I have absolutely nothing against his organisation. But such blind loyalty that borders on religious fundamentalism is taking this country nowhere. From experience it is abundantly clear to many of us that there is no amount of good that President Ian Khama can ever do without it being manipulated through systemic disinformation by opponents for political purposes. There is no prize for guessing who the chief enforcers of these bigoted dark tactics are. Unfortunately we in the media have also swallowed this narrative line, hook and sinker. Without exception, opposition parties in Botswana have a habit of giving all initiative to the ruling party.
When the country went into darkness for a stretched out period running into months because government had mismanaged a multi-billion Pula power plant facility, opposition parties could not even set aside their childish differences aside and come together to talk with one voice. Owing to their differences they could not even manage to organize a single public demonstration against power blackouts. When two years ago government mismanaged the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak and delivered thousands of farmers into abject poverty, our opposition parties chose instead to concentrate on harping on the little subjects that have continued to separate them over the years. Today all evidence to the fact that government is systematically mismanaging a security inter-agency dispute that has a potential to undermine the country’s overall national security with undertones of vast scale corruption there for all to see, yet all that our opposition parties can do is continue to remind the voter of their parochial differences instead of coming together to speak with one voice on such a key matter of national. Because the BDP government has often performed some of the most despicable acts the end result of it all has been that opposition parties have escaped media and public scrutiny, along the way earning themselves a totally underserved sympathy. The BDP, especially under Khama has been able to hang on to power this long because the party is up against double talking, amateurish, self-serving opposition politicians some of who have long come to a conclusion that the country is better off under BDP than under a government potentially shared between themselves.
More annoying is that these same parties often blame the voter for being conservative and resisting change. What they cannot even concede is the fact that it is them that are working very hard to make the BDP look invincible. For this to change the public and the media should be unrelenting in holding opposition parties to account for their behavior. Just as we should never compromise in our determination to hold those in power accountable, we should also insist on putting to public scrutiny and pushing out of their comfort redoubts those in opposition whose ambition is to get into power. It would be suicidal to wait for them to get in power before we start dissecting their behavior. If we don’t hold them accountable now while they are still out of power, we would have nobody to blame but ourselves when we realize that through our silence we have been complicit in the construction of monsters. And that seems to be what is happening. For a long time now I have suspected that some of our opposition parties exhibited much more ruthless instincts of intolerance than the ruling Botswana Democratic Party.
We have been wrong. When people without the cudgels of state power behave like the way some opposition politicians have been behaving recently citizens have every right to raise their antenna and even ring alarm bells. It is a sign of what to expect should such politicians access state power. The angry tantrums they often throw at the media cannot be viewed as isolated incidents. They portend a clear pattern of what to expect once they are in power. They will brook no dissent. But as always it is the media who are made to look like the villains of the piece. Also important going forward will be to study personalities behind our opposition parties much more than we currently are doing. Party manifesto are helpful, but only to appoint. We have to understand how key individuals in these parties behave when they are confronted with tricky situations. This is because running a country is much more difficult than running small choreographed opposition outfit where holding dissenting voices is viewed as alien.
The biggest mistake that the media has made has been to hold the two to different standards. It has proved unsustainable, in fact impossible just as is riding two horses at a time. For some time now we have tended to behave as though the threat to our democracy came only from the party in power. We were wrong. It’s time we look at both sides especially because bullying seems to be happening in fact growing from the other side too.
