BCP goes to Palapye for introspection
Ryder Gabathuse | Wednesday November 12, 2014 15:44
“Coming from elections where we performed not as we expected, it’s important that we assess the results and identify what ought to be done going forward,” BCP publicity secretary, Taolo Lucas said on Monday.
The BCP had targeted 29 parliamentary seats in all and won only three of the targeted.
In the October 24 elections, the ruling BDP got 37 elected MPs, plus four Specially Elected members, while the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) garnered 17, with BCP managing only three. Lucas said the process of assessing the 2014 general elections started with the party executive committee followed by the central committee making an assessment of the party’s performance.
This Saturday, the BCP expects between 300 and 400 party members to congregate under a Leadership Forum to evaluate its electoral performance.
Lucas, who was a parliamentary candidate for Bobirwa where he narrowly lost to incumbent Shaw Kgathi, said members of the party executive leadership have been visiting various constituencies as part of the evaluation exercise. Over and above the assessment of the party executive leadership, the central committee and the leadership forum, Lucas said they intended engaging independent people to look at the BCP performance in the elections. The BCP publicity secretary noted that this was not the first time the party had introspected after a poor performance in the general elections.
He recalled how the BCP went into the 1999 elections with 11 MPs only to have the late Joseph Kavindama surviving as the party’s sole MP. “It’s too early to point at any reason in particular to have been responsible for our below expected performance, but we continue to appreciate issues why we performed well in some areas and came up bad in others,” he said. The Palapye meeting wants to appreciate “in each constituency why we performed the way we did,” said Lucas, adding that, “We will not think of any other thing because as a party we really have to look at ourselves”.
“We are not going to contaminate the assignment of evaluating the elections performance with any other issues that may be divertive,” he said.
“You should expect us to be calm, mature and meticulous in the assessment of ourselves.” Quizzed about the BCP’s reaction to calls for them to join the coalition Umbrella for Democratic Change, Lucas said: “We don’t want to jump the gun and we are going into an assessment. We can’t rely on knee-jerk conclusions. Let us perform our thorough assessment first”.
He insisted that it was too early to talk about issues of that nature. “(But) such issues may come at different layers of our introspection. After a major event like the general elections, people will come with all sorts of assessments. As a party, we shall also be patient and we will not allow ourselves to be rushed into making any conclusions.”