Etcetera ||

SANDY GRANT | Tuesday February 28, 2012 00:00

But a party with its track record should by now have found itself a reputable historian to tell its tale from its beginnings when much of the rest of Africa regarded it with distaste.

This should be a proper history, not a whitewash job recording one electoral success after another.

We will all gain if we can learn about the lows as well as the highs, not just about the in-fighting but the various crises which confronted it from the Selebi Phikwe strike to the still unfinished World Cup projects today - the SSK airport and the National Stadium. 

A good history would also record the misjudgments and the mistakes.

It would also give us a much better idea about the contributions of the major players during those 50 years.  We have some idea about the four Presidents, we know that the populist Daniel Kwelagobe has provided the glue which has held the party together at grassroots level almost since the day he left St. Joseph's College.

We all know that the current Vice President is the heavy hitter, that Kebatlamang Morake was for long the supreme party man.

But it would be good to know more about the less trumpeted figures who may have been of greater significance than we now know and about major differences in Cabinet over policy.

Overall I suspect that our ignorance about the inner workings of the party far exceeds our knowledge of it.  An outsider noting the extraordinary amount of detailed, very personal coverage given by the commercial newspapers to the opposition parties could perhaps conclude that this is also characteristic of its approach to the ruling party.

But it doesn't work that way. Whereas the BDP is little inclined to open itself up to newspaper enquiry the opposition parties have welcomed such interest presumably in the belief that they can only gain from regular media coverage.

It seems probable to me, however, that the BDP has now grasped that the more this covers the opposition parties the greater the damage it causes them. 

For this reason, it may now have reversed its earlier attitude and become keen to advertise in those newspapers knowing that their continued, almost endless, fascination with the opposition parties and their leaders is, weekly, giving the BDP votes by the bucketful.

Presumably the commercial press cannot see it that way.  But where votes are concerned the experience of many of us over the celebration weekend may well be far more relevant than now seems to be assumed.

Midday last Friday, for instance, I was one of the thousands of unfortunate drivers in Gaborone whose further movement was stopped because one of the foreign dignitaries for the BDP bonanza had just arrived at the airport.  Without a watch, I was unable to know how long we all waited.  Perhaps 25-30 minutes.

Some years ago, I wrote with some warmth about the unconcern of one man, the President, who could bring the entire social and economic life of a large urban community to a protracted halt because he needed to get from A to B.

Terribly ill children could not reach the hospital because all traffic was stopped, vitally important financial deals could not be signed off, personal schedules were wrecked, and interviews and meetings were missed.

Thereafter there was a change and much greater sensitivity about organising the transit through the city of the President and his high level guests. But of late, we seem to have moved back to square one.

Having previously suggested that the BDP has so frequently been remarkably street wise, I must now suggest that it could be arranging matters with a great deal more slickness and skill than it is now demonstrating. My eventual assumption, from being one of those caught in that normal midday rush hour was that the traffic police (sic) had stopped all movement - I was at the Mass Media roundabout - because someone's plane had just arrived at the airport.  Sometime later, the anticipated convoy did eventually passed-by.

For parents taking young children home from school, the experience would have been ugly.

Indeed, had the sun been as merciless then as it had been during the preceding two days, I am convinced that the traffic police, having opened up the roads for normal usage, would have discovered that this could still not move because one of us had been found dead at the wheel of our oven boxes.

Other countries can organise a one- or two-minute traffic hold up - why do we need nearly 30?  Roads can be closed domino fashion as the dignitaries approach.

Close the road,  the dignitaries pass, re-open the road again. Closing roads when the visitors are still kilometres distant is not clever. It's also a certain vote loser.