UDC must put its house in order
Mmegi Editor | Friday July 6, 2018 11:13
The four coalition partners, Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD), Botswana National Front (BNF), Botswana Congress Party (BCP) and Botswana Peoples Party (BPP) hardly agree on anything.
Leaderships of some party will hold clandestine meetings to strategise how they will sabotage the other leadership.
It has emerged that the UDC National Executive Committee (NEC) will call meetings and other members will plead ignorance of such invitation and instead call their own meetings.
For sometime now, there has not been any order in the UDC. Nothing was done to reprimand the saboteurs of the Umbrella. It was business as usual at the Duma Boko-led coalition movement.
With 15 months left before the next general elections next year, the partners are still debating constituency and ward allocations.
Most of productive time is wasted in unending bickering. What is worst is that for more than five months, the UDC NEC has never met. The NEC spends most of the time exchanging vitriol on social media, especially WhatsApp.
How can a national movement such at the Umbrella be run by a WhatsApp group? This is a national crisis and the leadership of the UDC should explain why they are afraid to meet each other in a boardroom.
How will they run this Republic if they hate each other with such unbribled passion? Does that mean once in power, they will wantonly cancel weekly Cabinet meetings as they cannot stand the presence of each other?
Then there is the issue of the UDC constitution that was allegedly adopted at the February congress. We are reliably informed four attempts were made for a Constitution Taskforce made up by members from all coalition partners to be set up and most of the time other members from other parties never bothered to attend.
And then there was this particular meeting whereby one coalition member attended and raised some objections and said they will not participate.
They even charged that the constitution that was discussed at the February congress was bogus and submitted that the congress was also illegitimate and unlawful to adopt such resolutions.
As things stand, the UDC has not registered its constitution. And one of the leaders is threatening the UDC constitution will not be registered unless they registered the one he drafted. The less said about the UDC NEC WhatsApp leaks this week the better. Our parting shoot is that a house divided cannot stand. Pure and simple!
Today’s thought
“We will be engaging with all relevant stakeholders involved in this sorry affair and going forward with any other institution that seeks to maintain this dismissive attitude towards one of the major partners in our democratic space, the independent media.”
– MISA Botswana Board