“Hunyepa the spin doctor”
Tshireletso Motlogelwa | Monday March 7, 2022 06:00
He follows in the footsteps of equally discredited characters like Joseph Goebbels and Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, otherwise known as Comical Ali, so named because of the most outlandish claims he made during his daily press briefings during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was Comical Ali who claimed that American soldiers were committing suicide "by the hundreds" outside Baghdad, and further denied that there were any American tanks in the city, when in fact they were only several hundred metres away from the press conference venue and the combat sounds of nearing American troops could already be heard in the background of the broadcast.
This is the level our own Comical Hunyepa has descended to. He talks of an imagined "exponential growth" the BNF is experiencing under the leadership of Adv. Duma Boko. The facts on the ground tell a different story.
BNF has been decimated to the extent that it has only two MPs, and the leader could not even defend his own parliamentary seat. Where is Comical Hunyepa's "exponential growth" when the BNF surrendered all the Gaborone constituencies, Goodhope-Mabule, Kgatleng East, and Tlokweng? How does anyone make the claim that a party that has been run out of its traditional strongholds in Kanye is on an upward trajectory? When Bathoen Gaseitsiwe led the BNF as its president and later vice president, he beat the BDP in 1969, 1974, 1979, and 1984 before retiring from parliament in 1985. Similarly, Kenneth Koma never surrendered Gaborone South after wrestling it from BDP in 1984. The first leader we saw lose a parliamentary seat to BDP was Otsweletse Moupo after just a single term (like Boko).
But at least Comrade Moupo had the decency to own up that he had led the party down, and stepped aside. This is the decency and sense of accountability we don't see in Boko. A disciplined cadre of the organisation takes responsibility for his actions and failures. Boko has been the BNF President for more than a decade now.
Those who are pleading that Boko should be given more time should answer the question; more time to do what? To kill and bury the BNF?