New party, centre-left agenda needed

The words were prophetic in light of the abysmal failure of the opposition parties to seize the critical moment when they could have achieved the feat Seretse referred to.  There are two instances in which that critical moment presented itself: in 1999 and in 2009.

Going to 1999, it had become evident that the miners would not reap any more than a miserly wage from the profits at the mines.  Any benefit, as happens in all crude pseudo capitalist economies run under the dictatorship of the propertied, would go to the state.  The state bureaucrats only received marginal benefits as the finance ministers announced at the budget sessions that the government would soon have to rely on diamond revenues to replenish the recurrent budget, something that  that the 'planners' did not like to do.