But however one looks at it, what we are going through is a revolution. Who would have believed only a few weeks ago that Ndelu Seretse, a first cousin of the current president (Ian Khama), a senior minister of state and a leading Ngwato royal, whose late father served as a Vice President of the Republic could lose an internal BDP election in a Serowe constituency, his home village where royalty is still revered and venerated, a place that is both the party’s citadel and heartland, a place where a mere mention of the names Khama and Seretse evokes even among usually rational men and women brazen emotions of irrationality and senselessness?
But it has happened and perhaps not surprisingly, the official media seem too eager to underplay the event. This denialism is not at all surprising.
It typifies the extent to which our state media, which we must never fail to point out has some of the finest reporters this country has ever produced, continues to be a shadow of itself on account of a demining suffocation by politicians.
Over the last few weeks, I have had an opportunity to talk to a number BDP strategists.
None of them seems able to see the way ahead. It is all glum and gloom. What has hit their party, they all agree is unprecedented.
The current situation, they contend, is far worse than that which led to a split that sired the Botswana Movement for Democracy almost five years ago. And we should agree.
The party they say has lost all its inner resilience that has over the years allowed it to rise from the ashes.
While admittedly there is some element of blood feuding happening below the radars as was the case prior to the split, this time around the party is by far a victim of a few conniving pseudo-political criminals who are driven by senseless ambitions that are reprehensibly self-indulgent.
And unless the party rids itself of these elements, recovery may be hard to come by.
Ndelu Seretse fought a hard and long-drawn battle against an opponent who is by all accounts an outsider, but still lost.
Seretse lost not because he had done anything inherently bad.
He lost because ordinary people felt they had had enough of him. They simply wanted to see his back, no matter how much it cost them. It was by all manner a summary expulsion.
Change we must accept, when it comes cannot be stopped, not even by a determined, honourable, hardworking royalty with a big and illustrious surname behind his name such as is the case with Ndelu.
That is a big lesson that the BDP should take with itself as it prepares for the future.
A humble, brilliant though an aloof man with a priestly and royalty detachment, not to mention a perspective demeanour that is rare among our senior politicians, not even Seretse could have foreseen his impending loss a day before it happened. Up until the last ballot was counted and results declared, he genuinely and wholeheartedly believed that against all odds his attributes, his track-record and his family name would prevail and deliver the prize. But it did not happen.
And that is exactly the manner how the BDP will lose its power. When it finally happens that the BDP is expelled from power, the party would, like Ndelu, not see it coming. Exactly the same fate that has befallen Ndelu Seretse, awaits the BDP.
When a time comes for people to show BDP the door no mercy will be extended on account of the many good things that the party might have done during its long rule.
Acting like a hatchet man, all that the people would want to do would be to cut the party to pieces and get done with it.
And for their own sake, the BDP better brace for that time as early as now.
It certainly will not happen at the General Elections due next year.
But when it finally comes, not even the party’s most clear-sighted strategists would see it coming.
Our only hope is that when that time comes, the party’s lords will graciously accept defeat, quietly file and retire towards their respective manors, but more importantly allow that particular phase of the peasantry revolution to be to be televised.
