It has been a difficult and tense few weeks for our official Opposition.
We say so in diffidence and also as a deliberate understatement out of fear of rubbing the wrong way the increasingly prickly and irascible Opposition foot soldiers.
Since his arrival, President Mokgweetsi Masisi has been ticking all the right boxes.
This alone has been taking away all the oxygen from our cobbled coalition of Opposition parties.
They are suffocating; firstly because of their many unresolved internal contradictions, but perhaps more importantly because the new administration is openly addressing public grievances the Opposition had come to adopt as their drumbeat.
For the Opposition, Ian Khama was an immensely useful political enemy.
Not only did he bring the best out of Opposition, he also was conveniently used by them as a bogeyman.
In a very remarkable way, Khama increased Opposition’s capital purchase.
They did not have to say anything honesty or worth believing.
All they needed do was point at him and shout some scary epithets.
But it was always a slippery ladder.
With the arrival of Masisi, the Opposition is learning the hard way that the days of living under a fact-free utopia that Ian Khama’s haphazard reign allowed them have come to an abrupt end.
It will be almost impossible for the Opposition as we have come to know it to co-exist, let alone thrive with Masisi.
“We are on a gridlock,” an Opposition enthusiast said to me this week.
He blamed a lack of direction from top leadership.
Distrust, he said is soiling the air.
The biggest fear, he added, is that it is only just the beginning.
Prior to the last General Elections in 2014, issues to do with water and electricity shortages, together with the tragic death of Gomolemo Motswaledi helped spur the Umbrella for Democratic Change back to life.
And to their credit, the UDC leaders very wisely tapped into public discontent arising from these issues.
All the UDC needed do, which they did was to tell the people that they felt the pain.
It turned out to be a simple but very effective strategy.
But it was Ian Khama’s recalcitrant and divisive brand of politics that really was always an electoral asset for the UDC.
The UDC made him their target. And his blunder-strewn presidency only served to enhance their potency.
Now Khama is gone and the UDC is struggling to gain traction.
With the arrival of a new president the country seems to be moving swiftly to an unanimity of ideas.
Outside of the raging civil wars inside opposition, there are no disagreements on any other big public subject.
With a few exceptions and footnotes, the opposition seems to be nodding, even dancing to all of the new president’s ideas.
They are under a grip of the Masisi fever. Like the rest of the country, the Opposition has gone Masisi-craze.
For now it might all pass as opportunism. With time it will morph into political corruption.
After teaming up with the ruling party to shoot down calls for a commission of enquiry at the National Petroleum Fund, it would require bravery and a rare moral uprightness for any opposition leader to now stand up and feign any outrage against corruption in government.
That NPF decision by the UDC formally announced the arrival of the politics of compliance the worst of which we are yet to see.
On the voter, this decision has had a psychological effect of creating a one-party state with complicit approval by the opposition.
It’s little wonder that the party has lost its magnetic power to attract people the way it did just a year ago. It’s not the first time the country’s opposition finds itself in choppy waters.
In fact it has happened too many times in the past that opposition found itself besieged by bad weather.
But this time around the situation is made all the worse by the fact that too many people had come to believe that victory in the next elections was a certainty.
Based on the goodwill created in 2014, all that the UDC needed was to manage itself until 2019.
It has failed to do just that.
Instead of creating a conflict with the ruling party, the UDC has mounted a conflict with itself.
The coalition’s problems are myriad.
But a lack of internal trust is by far the biggest of those.
Lethargy and general ineptitude at leadership levels are the others.
Appointments are often not honoured. And when they are honoured, people arrive too late at such meetings.
Their current state bodes ill for the cut-throat elections due next year.
There are several examples that can be justifiably drawn from past cases of self-destruction by the ruling Botswana Democratic Party, but to be fair to the party, it has an admirable record of resilience and coming back to bit odds.
Its current upward trajectory is just one example of the many where the party has risen from the dead ÔÇô literally.
Masisi and his BDP have accurately interpreted the good performance by opposition in 2014 as a potentially lethal shot across the bows.
And since then, the BDP has been fighting back. Results are beginning to show.
One big result of it all is growing irrelevance on the part of opposition.
Once again, Botswana is a one-party state. And evidence is all around us.
