Support the gutsy independents,go the socialist route

RAMPHOLO MOLEFHE | Friday January 29, 2010 00:00

He has acted as leader before.  He knows the people at the BNF and at the BCP.  His neutrality might have helped to rekindle hope for cooperation between the opposition parties in which he also has a personal interest.  He will probably be more comfortable as a member of the BNF than as an independent.

If push came to shove, the rightists at the BDP would most likely have supported the candidature of the BNF, which is probably why things turned out as they did. Vice president of the BNF, Olebile Gaborone, took the position.

He will be under constant scrutiny from the BCP, who consider themselves equally entitled to leadership of the house.  Though Modubule has been freed from the responsibilities of parliamentary leadership to do work for Lobatse, it will be without any empathy from the governing party.  The constituency is likely to suffer until a few months before the 2014 general elections when the ruling Botswana Democratic Party launches its campaign.  The effect of that strategy was felt with great effect in Gaborone South and Gaborone West North where the BNF lost both seats to the BDP.

(It would also be interesting to find out whether the families that were relocated from Gaborone South to G/West were predominantly BNF, thus shifting the balance in favour of the BDP, especially that the BNF and the elected candidate, Akanyang Magama were embroiled in court battles, reconciling only a few minutes before polling day.  Further, it could very well be possible that the batch that relocated to the West constituencies from the South voted for the BDP in gratitude for their upliftment  from the ghetto whilst also registering their disdain for the BNF's suicidal appetite for infighting). 

In any case, what is the position of parliament in Botswana's so-called 'liberal democracy'?

* What impression is the individual parliamentarian able to make on parliament?
* What effective contribution can the opposition make to the lawmaking process at the house?

Let's go back a little bit. In the late 1960s, three men, Nkhwa, Phillip Matante and Motsamai Mpho are reported to have played an influential role in the establishment of the Botswana Defence Force and partial disengagement of Botswana's economy from the South African Rand, finally establishing the Pula as the national currency.

They were all groomed in the tradition of the anti colonial struggles in South Africa and Zimbabwe, getting their political inspiration from Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Sobukwe.

They brought the vitality of that regional struggle to Botswana's parliament where the BDP was inspired by a distant association with British style democracy through Seretse Khama and the few who had visited London, among them the much vaunted great chiefs - Khama, Sechele and Bathoen - who are credited rightly or wrongly with securing protectorate status for the Bechuanaland Protectorate.

The rhetoric of the anti-colonial struggle in southern Africa resonated much more clearly with the migrant workers who experienced apartheid in the South African mines and on the Afrikaner farms and the domestics who kept the kitchens of the whites there.  But their revolutionary edge was smothered by the more pervasive deference of the moraka and masimo people to the chiefs and educated elite who made Domkrag declaring solidarity with British colonialism of the new type.

The left of that generation, reflected in Matante's Botswana Peoples Party and Mpho's Independence Party were thus easily thwarted by the alliance of the Democratic Party with the British and western imperialism in general.

Out of the first 24 member Parliament in 1966, the opposition parties were only able to salvage three seats despite their activism and popularity in Lobatse, Ramotswa, Tlokweng, Mochudi, the North East, Fracistown and Maun.

That made the five seats that the Botswana National Front gained out of the 28/32 member parliament look like a dramatic increase even though mathematically it was not. 

The drama was really in the acquisition of the Jwaneng, Gaborone and Fracistown councils and in the final arrival of Kenneth Koma in parliament via the capital city constituencies where Maitshwarelo Dabutha had fought a lone struggle since 1979.

Those were the glorious 10 years of the opposition which raised its representation to 13 seats in 1994, but that was also to be its Achilles heel.

The organisational structures of the BNF were overwhelmed by its increased membership and popularity.

But it was in fact the political content of the front-party's agenda that suffered the greatest damage.  The electoral success of the organisation was for the most part a reflection of the growing ambiguity and lack of clarity of its political programme which, for most voters, hinged only on disaffection with the performance of the BDP.

The BDP seemed to have no handle on ill treatment of employees at the mines and in the commercial and retail sectors.  Aspiring small and middle level business people were not credit worthy and their ambitions were smothered by competition with the South Africans.  The cost of living was becoming increasingly intolerable for the middle class and for the poor and unemployed.

The class gap in health, education, housing, water and electricity services was blatantly obvious.  The government utilities were failing and teeming with maladministration and corruption.  The urban elite, most of them identified with Domkrag, were busy dispossessing the stranded owners of masimo and meraka of 'communal' land, building town houses and other forms of real estate.

Koma worked methodically to strip the BNF politics of its fiery socialist rhetoric carving it into something of a 'class neutral' argument that only sought to point to the BDP's failure to perform rather than to any fundamental differences in policy between the two parties.

That soon led to inner-party calls for rewriting his Pamphlet No 1, replacing it with the 'Social Democratic Programme' as the 'guiding document' of the BNF.  His lieutenants complained that he had built a personality cult around himself, one which they themselves had cultivated and nurtured.  When they finally could not take it the sitting MPs and others resolved to form the BCP which failed to secure a single seat in parliament until they got one in 2004. The party increased its representation to five in 2009.

Some curious questions arise: -

* Five seats out of 44 for the BCP in 2009 is not much of an advance over 13 for the BNF out of 34 in 1994.  Add the BNF's current five seats to those of the BCP and the picture does not change very much.  The researchers must say whether the vote that is going to the BCP is coming from the BNF or whether it represents gains from the BDP.  They must indicate whether the personality of the opposition voter has changed or whether we are still in the main looking at the same pool of opposition supporters from the 1984-94 glory years of the BNF. (The people who were born then were eligible to vote in 2009). 

* What is it that caused the demise of the opposition in Gaborone in 2009?  Could there be any comparison between that and the downfall of the BPP in Francistown after the death of Matante 25 years ago?  What is the role of 'opposition fatigue' after the voters gave the BNF a chance since 1984?  Are the voters not simply tired of experimenting with an opposition which seems to be more preoccupied with its own suicide than with winning power?

* What is the effect of poverty on voting patterns?  Could it be that the poorer the people get, the more they revert to conservatism, looking for salvation from the old order; from the chiefs, from the army and police, from Christian morality and Seretse?  If that is true, should we count the recent international economic recession as an assisting factor in driving the voters towards the BDP, or at least stabilising their stay there? The BDP was heard pleading poverty at every stage of the 2009 election campaign in stark contrast to past electoral claims of lifting the country from the dirt to prosperity.

That is for the researchers to say. What seems to be more certain is that the voters are stuck with the political impasse of an ossified ruling party that is still frozen in a development agenda based on the economic advancement of the rural elite and a handful of urban business people on the one hand, and an opposition that appears to be content with just playing with itself.

But, over the years, the BDP has successfully turned the state into a government-company through the partnership of De Beers and other international private interests together with the indigenous ruling class of cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, a handful of big farmers, some in real estate, a few manufacturers and some large traders. 

They have the support of the largest section of the intelligentsia at the university, anti AIDs, sports and arts organisations, BOCCIM, sections of the trade union movement and the larger civil society.  They have strong support among managers of the private sector and particularly, the churches and the army and police. 

They maintain strict oversight over the judiciary and the press employing the law, spies, technology, intimidation and a sophisticated and widespread system of patronage sponsored by government financial assistance programmes, the NDB and the commercial banks. There is yet no alternative to rival the pervasive presence of the government-company in every sector of society.  The more liberal sections of the private sector consider the price to pay for a competitive democracy too high when measured against the probable consequences, say perhaps, banishment from doing business in Botswana.

The diplomatic corps and donor agencies play possum, quietly financing government campaigns against the Basarwa, against independent journalism and the genuine trade unions. The saga between Gaborone Central nominee, Gomolemo Motswanaledi, for the 2009 general elections, and the president of the BDP, Ian Khama, announces a management style of the government-company to entrench the personal authority of the leader of the party over all institutions of governance. He is also guaranteed presidency of the country without having to stand for popular election.   At the BDP, the leader has formed parallel management structures to those that were put in place by the party congress at Kanye last year.  So whilst Botswana's democracy has borrowed the face of a liberal dispensation abroad, it is becoming increasingly evident that the country is moving backward into feudal conservatism and army style management, and further away from global standards of democratic governance.

The growing system of personal patronage, raised to great heights by Ian Khama, appears to have engulfed the leaders of the BNF, the party's MPs and other activists, who naively claim that Botswana is not drifting towards a dictatorship; that 'if the Batswana were to characterise the current regime as dictatorial they would not be able to recognise true dictatorship when it comes'.

The question becomes:  How can they be expected to recognise the dictator when they have taken his bribe?

When it seemed least likely to succeed, Khama was able to invoke personal patronage, the Stalinist conduct of party business, and the sentiments of the conservative elements of the society that condemn alcohol and the entertainment industry to prevail upon an impoverished electorate which has not been trained out of mindless obedience to chiefs and army generals.

As all this proceeds, good care is taken to keep the De Beers sponsored government-company erect and efficiently fuelled.

It can only be concluded that: -

* Botswana's democracy has steadily reverted over the years to the values of governance which were rejected by the founding fathers who respected the right of citizens to the conduct of their private lives.  They acknowledged the supremacy of parliament in the balancing act of providing the judiciary and the executive with their space in the process of governance.   They shunned, even if they hardly lived by the principle, the interference of private interests in the determination of the national interest of the Batswana.  They wanted the anti-democratic institutions of the chieftainship and the army at a distance away from parliament, the system of justice and the executive.  They wanted independence of the professionals in the 'civil service' and they pronounced that they also believed in freedom of expression even if the principle was not entrenched in the constitution they wrote.

* Botswana needs a radical transformation of the opposition towards taking the shape of a single and unified socialist party that will commit not just to opposition of the ruling party, but to advocacy for the real political, economic and social rights of the working class and the disenfranchised. * In the meantime, democracy will benefit a great deal from unwavering support for the gutsy independents who took on their parties to claim their space on the political playing field.  Nehemiah Modubule and Botsalo Ntuane stand out as independent minded advocates of some aspects of the social democratic ideal that could help to further reform the Domkrag programme.