50 years under multiparty democracy and after swaying the initially, single-party African democracies, how many Batswana can sincerely say their country is a true multiparty democracy? If the answer is none, why has the country not lived up to its design? Why is Botswana a single-party democracy in practice?
Did we mean it when we said we were a multiparty democracy? Did we only wish it or did we change our (collective) mind as the years went by? What happened? Did the party that won the first general elections, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) alias Domkrag, after tasting the tastiness of power, revise its creed and decide that single party democracy was a delicacy not to be shared with others? Or was it the BDP rivals, the opposition who decided, that fulfilling the promise of government of the people by the people for the people, was beyond their capacity and therefore they had to be steady and content instead of vigorously striving for power? Could it be that the opposition were never able to learn the art of wrestling power from pretenders?
