An attempt to make sense of what Botswana opposition leaders really stand for these days is like a wild-goose-chase; no sooner have you got it in your finger tips than it is already flying high inviting you for further chase.
The more one tries to give them benefit of doubt by taking them seriously, the more they behave like winged creatures. They are sly, dishonest and manipulative.
Try to understand for example their position on Isaac Kgosi and one is left no wiser.
In fact their position on the man is by far the most glaring example of reasons behind UDC’s internal explosion.
UDC leaders want to treat the country like some vast Debating Club where they can say what they want and get away with without a wince of accountability.
They seem to think that country and Government are some kind of a test tube where they can experiment their outlandish theories and eccentric ideas.
UDC leaders’ detachment from reality is only comparable to their abstract idealism.
They seem to genuinely believe that they can argue their way into state power without working for it, much less owning up to their deficits and deficiencies.
The only thing consistent about their modus operandi is duping and confusing all of us every time they recoil to their exotic worlds ÔÇô a phenomenon they do so often.
They must be called out for what they really are ÔÇô clowns.
Calling them “leaders” as opposed to clowns provides us as a nation with an excuse which is a kind of coverup for our dismal failures to produce leaders as a nation.
There is nothing in their conduct that resembles the behavior of leadership.
Calling them leaders is a self-fulfilling kind of denialism. The trouble though is that it takes us nowhere.
Such denialism stops us from taking appropriate steps to remedy the disease that the nation faces ÔÇô which is that the country has become a one-party-state.
An acquaintance of mine, a lifelong supporter of the Botswana National Front who I have known since I was a little boy growing up in Tonota recently said to me that Batswana should count their blessings that UDC did not win state power in 2014.
“This country would be on flames,” he said. He was talking like a loyal but disappointed supporter of the UDC, albeit who likes the country even more.
He was hurt, but more importantly being cruelly honest.
Having failed to retain legitimacy in the eyes of the public, UDC leaders are now resorting to totally unconventional as to be alien ways to win state power.
The questions they are facing are basic, yet UDC leaders are providing very complicated answers.
As always, their strategy is shiftless: To confuse all of us. As always they expect their followers and indeed the rest of the country to blithely believe them. They are taking everybody for a fool.
We should not allow them to get away with it.
Instead we should force them to come down to reality ÔÇô where the rest of us are living.
The behavior of these so-called leaders is fuelling public antipathy and popular disapproval towards politics and politicians. We are likely to see a groundswell of voter apathy in the General Elections next year.
The good news is that increasingly, citizens are beginning to see through all the chicanery.
What these people are doing has got nothing to do with politics.
Rather it has all to do with their defective and deficient personalities.
Take for example thinly veiled threats by one of them that charging Isaac Kgosi will bring down an apocalypse.
UDC is burning and yet the best we can hear from those in charge are empty threats of Armageddon should a crime suspect be brought to justice. Talk of deflecting attention!
In their quest for power, UDC is trying to use side issues to win back its lost relevance and install themselves as possible kingmakers.
The use of hyperbole knows no limit.
Along the way President Mokgweetsi Masisi is literally being blackmailed.
Nowhere in the world has a sitting head of state been blackmailed like this.
Indeed Batswana should count themselves lucky that UDC did not win state power in 2014.
This is unpardonable. It would be much better for Masisi to lose power than to live under the jackboot of such crude blackmail.
Those in authority should charge Kgosi.
We need to see if the alleged apocalypse will happen.
The same UDC leaders have in the past warned of much bigger things.
None of those have come to pass.
Why should we believe them this time when they say that charging their new master in the form of Isaac Kgosi will bring the world to an end?
