Vote rigging in Botswana general elections?
Michael Dingake | Tuesday January 21, 2014 16:57
Like all competitive events performance depends much on regular and concerted training in preparation for the event. Hit-and-miss, haphazard type of training won’t yield good results. Where should the candidates start? To be certain the candidates must engage the voters from the word go; they must demonstrate by word and deed they aren’t on a binge, a flirtatious course but on a mission to marry the voters, ‘till death do us part!’
Some candidate-pretenders have already bitten the dust. Complaints to relevant structures have been lodged and are being processed. Losers will start preparing for the next primaries, winners for the main contest. The earliest bird catches the fattest worm! At this juncture successful candidates will have support from party primaries rivals if they have succeeded in making reconciliation which they ought to make. Failure to reconcile with erstwhile party rivals can be disastrous, it’s essential to avoid fighting the war on many fronts, therefore reconciliation is of the utmost importance!
We hear the refrain, ‘free and fair’ elections whenever general elections are discussed. Botswana is credited with the ‘free and fair’ elections tag! Opinion is beginning to diverge whether the country conducts ‘fair’ elections. The argument revolves around whether ‘fair’ elections can happen on an unlevel playground. The ruling party is over-resourced, enjoys incumbency which it exploits to the limit, whereas the opposition parties lack resources and are vulnerable to election manipulation by the ruling party. There is agitation and demand at present that the playground can be levelled by introduction of public party funding, the culture of governing multiparty democracies, except Botswana, the ‘shining example’ of democracy! For the moment, the protagonists of public party funding are holding the floor. On whether the elections are free in Botswana there is consensus that general elections in Botswana are free of violence. No Motswana voter was ever coerced to vote for one party and not another. Batswana vote for political parties without coercion, unless bribery and vote buying can be classified as coercion; moreover nobody gets worked-up if Batswana don’t vote, as they habitually do, some of them.
The nagging question is, are the Botswana General Elections ‘fair? Or are they unfair simply because of lack of public party funding? Lack of public party funding is a fraction of vote rigging, the ultimate source of unfairness. In spite of the large resources it enjoys vis-a-vis the opposition parties Domkrag indulges in other hidden, subtle, sophisticated yet obnoxious forms of vote rigging. Vote rigging can be defined as: tampering with the election process for partisan advantage or fraudulent manipulation and fixing of the outcome of election results in advance. In countries without election management bodies e.g, the IEC, rigging tends to be crude: ballot boxes are stuffed , voters’ rolls tampered with, names of voters likely to support or vote for opposition are expunged and substituted by dead persons’ names on the voters roll, alternatively counting officer(s) can play the Tshiamo stunt with impunity, sit on a ballot box from pro-opposition polling station as happened in Gaborone South (Tshiamo Box) constituency, in 1985! The question is, ‘can it happen now under the IEC?’ Yes, it can happen. As long as the IEC enjoys limited independence where it still depends on staff from government departments, it can happen. That is why the IEC must be granted full independence - adequate resource provision to enable it to recruit, train and deploy its own staff to avoid the Trojan horse eventuality in the election process. The fact that the delimitation process is in the hands of the President implies that the process is rigged from inception. Hence the 2003 SADC Regional Conference on Principles for Election Management recommended inter alia that, “delimitation process be managed by an independent and impartial body that is representative of the society, comprising persons with appropriate skills...” In Botswana the President, the leader of the ruling party manages the delimitation process and gerrymanders and rigs the process to his heart’s content, from the word go. Vote rigging starts with delimitation. Another form of rigging is in the state monopoly of the media. The 2003 SADC Conference recommended among others , “All contesting parties and candidates should have equal access to the public media ..... and media coverage of the elections should be subject to a code of conduct designed to promote fair reporting.” Since there is nothing close to these recommendations in Botswana, we can safely assume that the election process in Botswana is a favourite candidate for inbred rigging. The fact that Domkrag is adamant that it is entitled to the monopoly of the state media regardless of impact on the opposition, is evidence that the rigging is deliberate and arrogant!
Lack of voter education is another form of rigging. That’s why we have eligible voters who threaten to boycott elections in protest against broken pledges by government; poor people don’t know better, they are forced to buy a pig in a poker! The 2003 conference among others recommended: “Voter education should be provided in the ...context of a commitment to civic and democracy education throughout the country even between the elections..”And, “Governments should prioritise the funding of civic and voter education by providing for it in the state budget prior to the elections.” The fact that voter education under Domie is a non-priority in the scheme of election process, identifies Domie as the silent, stoical, barefaced vote rigger! Elections in Botswana are rigged and unfair! Period!