BPP Youth vow to rebrand their party

The newly-elected president of the Botswana People’s Party Youth League (BPPYL) Mbaakanyi Smart has vowed to work hard with his team to revive the party. Smart promised to come up with a robust approach and structures that will lead BPP to the 2019 general election. He said one of their resolutions is to rebrand BPP towards 2019.

Smart said they were given six constituencies under the allocation of 2014 general election by the UDC because it was believed that the northern part of the country is their stronghold. However, out of all the six constituencies being Nata-Gweta, Shashe West, Nkange, Francistown West, Tati East and Tati West, they did not win any one of them. “Phase one of our project entails going to all the six constituencies that we were allocated to talk to our members so that we revive what has been lost in BPP. We will ask them where we need to improve so that we create a better future for the party because for now even the members of the party have lost interest so I think it is high time we engage them on the way forward,” Smart said.

According to him the second phase will entail registration of members and verification of membership list. He said it is important to know how many members they have so that the 2019 general election finds them prepared.They will also target other constituencies in their recruitment drive for members. Smart said the BPP youth supports cooperation between the UDC and BPP and that one of their resolutions was to work closely with other youths of different parties to share ideas in their efforts to rebrand the party. “We have never had a BPPYL, we just had an interim chairperson as far back as 1999. We worked hard to have a youth league so we need guidance from parties that have been having youth committees for a longer time. We are happy with our chairperson in the interim committee, Gerald Dubani; he worked hard for us to be here,” Smart said.

For his part the former chairperson Dubani encouraged Smart to work hard and benchmark from well-established organisations for them to get there sooner than later. Dubani said that it is an open secret that their competitors happen to perform better than them in every election as a result of well-established youth league structures.