An election like no other
The countdown to our general election has begun. The mood is getting ultra feverish for both candidates and the electorate. Very soon the kitchen will be too hot to countenance. Let’s just hope all the men and women that took the vow of allegiance to their political parties will stay true to their word – we want men and women of honour! There’s nothing as annoying as having to find an alternative candidate to vote for because the initial primary election winner has bolted! This not only causes confusion for the electorate but also for the party! I reckon it’s high time the All Party Conference convened a meeting to thrash this contentious issue. Floor crossing has been the bane of our democracy. It is the playground for men and women that largely subscribe to ‘politics of the stomach’ – these are unprincipled men and women, who refuse to submit to party discipline; the party line; the party ideology or the party’s values. Instead they want to be bigger than the party; but truth be told, democracy is about strong institutions and not strong men. The latter will come and go but the former will remain solid as a rock. There has been so much shuffling across the board. Mekoko, or independent candidates have also emerged yet we know that even as they represent an alternative view, they are by and large, a waste of time. Oft-times these mekoko don’t even have manifestos, so what are the campaign promises that the electorate can hold them to account? Government is not formed by mekoko but by serious-minded political parties that have well-thought out manifestos, which represent their minimum programmes of action.In this election the stakes are high – it’s hard to predict the winner. What we know is that much as we regard the electorate as gullible and fickle, they can easily outsmart so-called political analysts! Electorates are cunning people; they are observant – they listen carefully and they pick salient comments from the candidates. The difficult part of knowing their train of thought is that voting is by secret ballot. A man or woman may profess loyalty to one candidate only to change his or her mind at the last minute inside that closed booth! Be that as it may, the politcal dynamics have drastically, but not fundamentally altered. The ruling party has splintered not once, but twice – it is the proud mother of Botswana Movement for Democracy and Botswana Patriotic Front as well as the granny to Alliance for Progressives. These offsprings are not in a pact with any other political formation. They will contest the election individually. Their strengths will be put to the real test on October 23. On the other hand, Botswana National Front has formed a coalition with its offspring, Botswana Congress Party as well as the country’s oldest political party, Botswana People’s Party. The three will pool their resources and hope to attract voters to their side during polling day, if only they can sustain this semblance of unity – afterall unity is strength! But the new kid on the block – BPF threatens to be a spanner in the works at worst or the silver lining at best. The party intends to remove the ruling party and especially its presudent from power through supporting the BNF, BCP, BPP coalition of Umbrella for Democratic Change. They will support UDC in constituencies that they have not fielded candidates, but the funny part is that in some constituencies they are contesting against the UDC and the ruling party! Once again only the results will tell us the voting patterns of the electorate in this year’s poll. It is hard to predict. As for the Botswana Democratic Party they have suffered the worst storms this past decade. The question is whether they can reinvent themselves or not. The party is half alive and half dead. It will depend which side of the bed it chooses to wake up on! A figurative picture of the BDP is aptly manifested in that protected Morula Tree behind American Embassy. This is the tree under which the party’s founders sat back in 1962 along the road to Tlokweng to found a monolith that has ruled since independence in 1965. But can it weather the storm this time around, or has Fortune turned her face the other way? Again we can only wait for October 23, when hopefully all the 930933 registered voters will turn up at the voting stations to exercise their franchise. What we can only hope for is that once the dust has settled, we will have capable men and women who have the interest of the nation at heart not self-serving parasites that prey on the people – the selfsame that validate the descritpion of democracy as ‘tyranny of the majority!’