Forget about the BDP Congress in Maun next week, it is a costly and diversionary ritual that will not bring any changes;  our real problems have to do with electricity, or the lack of it and the haemorrhage in jobs it is causing our economy.
That was pretty how I had drafted my weekly column before an intervention by the BDP Secretary General in The Voice Newspaper forced me to change my line.
According to Mpho “our turn to eat” Balopi there is nothing wrong with the ruling party giving its activists the leg-up towards state coffers by way of tenders. When ruling party activists eat, the nation eats, he implies.
According to Balopi, state jobs are all part of the perks, the benefits that go with being in power.
Join the party and you will also eat, he seems to be saying.
When it gets to BDP’s acclaimed cleanliness, I have always been a non-believer.
But even by the party’s horrid standards, Balopi’s latest assertion altogether breaks a new ground. It contaminates the already contaminated.
From his statement he very clearly has been to Johannesburg in recent times where, without doubt, he took to reading the ANC copy book.
Rewarding the activists may initially seem like a good thing.
But where does it stop? Experience shows that once you are on it, it is a tiger that you cannot dismount.
The South Africans can attest to it.
Not only do they practice it, they also have even coined a nice word for it.
It’s called tenderpreneurship.
In South Africa, tenderpreneurship is a system that has literally turned the ANC up-side-down.
Not only is the ANC on its knees, it also has now become a shadow of itself.
In South Africa, tenderpreneurship, as advocated by Balopi, has paralysed that country, pitted comrade against comrade and turned the government into a bloated employment agency. For the ANC, tenderpreneurship has degenerated into  a feeding trough from where big party wigs spend all day planning amongst themselves on just how best to strip the nation bare.  
And the price has been too heavy for all involved.
Exactly why the BDP’s Balopi now wants to import into Botswana a system that has so badly failed in South Africa boggles my mind.
But then Balopi should not be hanged for saying it out. In fact, we should be grateful to Balopi.
He is an honest man. He means what he says.
Unfortunately, his honesty reflects very badly on the true level of his political consciousness.
He is sharing with the public a private and confidential discourse that is very much an internal point of discussion among the carpetbaggers that today control the BDP. The more discerning, more savvy and more politically sophisticated among them will no doubt be disappointed by Balopi’s decision. They are unlikely to forgive him, or better still, he may yet pay the ultimate price for being reckless with information.
But still outsiders should be grateful.
What Balopi is saying is exactly what this column has been raving against since the contest for control of the BDP started to take shape.
Today’s BDP is not that of P.K Morake, G.S Mosinyi or Moutlakgola Ngwako.
Today, people join the BDP not because they want to serve but because the party holds the greatest prospect and, with that, the greatest promise of making themselves wealthy.
In fact, was Seretse Khama to wake up from the dead today, he would most likely not recognize the party that he created.
Not only would he be repulsed by the BDP, he could, based on its Secretary General’s philosophy, most probably mistake the BNF, or better still, the BMD for his own creation.
That is how far down the tube the BDP has gone.
Even at face value, from the look of things not every BDP member will be welcome at the feeding trough that Balopi and his ilk want created.
There is a hierarchy and order that will be followed. At the centre, where the feed is fattest and most juicy will sit party strongmen like Balopi and those in his lobby list.
The rest of members will become fodder whose utility cannot be explained beyond the congress.
We, the non-members, have no place even under the sun.
And for that Balopi should be careful.
The new culture that he together with his cabal is trying  to impose on the BDP will inevitably lead to exclusion. And here we are not even talking about divisions that will, with time, emerge between and within the top brass.
Rather, we are referring to the excluded majority who, once aggrieved to be left out, will mount on a course that will ultimately bring down the BDP.
From Balopi’s statement, it is abundantly clear that the BDP has not learnt the true reasons that led to its first and only split in history.
But how did the BDP end up in a position where it has a Secretary General who sees nothing wrong with party leaders putting their fingers in the till?
That is a question that came to my mind when it appeared that from early on, the contest for the BDP Chairmanship was, by all intents and purposes, a one horse race.
While Pelonomi Venson had made her intentions known, until last week she pretty very much allowed Samson Guma Moyo to determine the pace, the texture and as we may soon find out, the outcome as well.
May be she had a strategy, but Venson left it to the last minute.
And she may yet pay a hefty price for believing that today’s BDP is the same one that she joined years ago.
