BDP Shooting Itself in the Foot by Weakening BCP (Part II)
Correspondent | Friday October 21, 2016 17:22
However, the party has since become mum on Ntuane’s suggested reforms in fact one gets the impression that his suggested reforms are being rejected. Perhaps, here we should also mention that Ntuane himself was part of a group of BDP members who defected from the party and formed the Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD) in 2010. He defected back to the BDP in 2012. Nonetheless, the supervision of Vice President Mokgweetsi Masisi the BDP has since embarked on intensive and extensive recruitment drive of BCP members who were strongly opposed to the decision taken by their party to become part of the UDC formation.
Our view is that the Masisi’s campaign seems to be influenced by his worshipping at the altar of BDP’s part ‘glory’. On the other hand, Ntuane’s suggested reform model was influenced by realistic gazing at the country’s political crystal ball. It is important to understand the fact that Ntuane unlike Masisi has been baptized in the trenches of opposition politics where life is extremely hard! This is why he fears for the BDP should it lose elections in 2019. His two-year stint as vice president of the BMD and leader of opposition in Parliament was a critical eye-opener in his political career. This gave him firsthand experience of the poverty the opposition is subjected to. He also witnessed how opposition politics deplete activists’ personal and family resources.
As the leader of opposition in Parliament he was dishonoured and disrespected by the powers that be. For instance, his requests that he meet with foreign heads of state visiting Botswana in line with tradition were rubbished by the then Minister of Foreign Affairs as a waste of government resources, and time for the visiting international leaders! In his reform document Ntuane also argued that the BDP central committee should be actively involved in the everyday running of government and implementation of its policies in order to hold the executive to account. He also felt that this would improve service delivery, a rather doubtful proposition in our view because it would have the effect of weakening the executive or the small ruling elite’s tight grip on the levers of their patronage –control over state resources!
The major argument of our piece is that by offloading disgruntled anti-UDC hardliners from the BCP, the BDP is actually doing the BCP and the opposition in general a great favour. By the same token the BDP could be doing itself great disservice. By shifting to the BDP the defectors are sparing the BCP instability which they could cause within the party if they had stayed on. They could have mobilised other party members against the current pro-cooperation party leadership. Sometimes this takes the form of long running and disruptive litigation as has happened countless times in the BNF over the years.
Some high profile defectors are also given preferential treatment over and above long-serving party activists. You should remember in the then BDP held Tlokweng constituency that the winner of the party’s primary elections and veteran activist was robbed of his hard-won victory to make way for a defector from the BNF. This destabilised the BDP in the constituency which it lost to the BNF during the 2014 elections. (The BNF hierarchy had also done the same thing in Tonota constituency which they also lost. However, this was a traditional BDP stronghold). The consequence of developments in Tlokweng was defection of some BDP activists to the BNF.
More often than not the defectors are welcome into their new parties with all the pomp and ceremony. Usually the defectors are given ample time at freedom squares to lash at the leaders of their former parties. Although political parties present defectors as critical in winning elections this is grossly exaggerated. There are countless instances where the defectors found the going tough in their new political homes and had to beat a retreat back to their former parties. It is seldom that a defector manages to trick the voter!
Whereas some high profile defectors presents themselves as ‘brand names’ and game-changers in their own right, in a good number of cases they fail or lose elections. In those cases where defectors do win elections it is highly likely that the party would still have won even without the involvement of the defector. People seldom follow defectors to their new parties and as we just indicated sometimes the same defectors beat a hasty retreat back to the same parties they had left.
It has to be noted that a good number of opposition parliamentarians who crossed the floor to the BDP went on to lose during the 2014 elections. This includes Botsalo Ntuane himself. It is also highly likely that in the 2019 elections the BCP will regain the Okavango constituency whose parliamentarian recently defected to the BDP.
The BDP won the Gaborone constituency in the 2014 elections as a result of vote splitting by a BNF member who contested as an independent candidate. He has since been recruited into the BDP and the BNF is likely to win the constituency since he is now out of the way.
Another factor that the BDP recruiters seem to misjudge is the resilience demonstrated by the opposition parties over the years. For instance, the BNF has a tradition of experiencing destabilising faction fighting and splits prior to general elections.
However, the party has shown remarkable resilience of always bouncing back. For instance, towards the 2014 elections a worryingly big number of BNF leaders, among whom were parliamentarians, defected to both the BDP and BCP, but the party went on to do impressively well in the elections as part of the UDC project.
JOHN MAKGALA & BANYATSI MMEKWA