It therefore seems plausible to say it must be the MPs who for some unknown reason are against their voices being heard over the wires or their gesticulations viewed on Btv. As a former MP I should know better why there are no live broadcasts of Parliamentary debates when our counterparts in new democracies enjoy hearing the voices of their MPs arguing for their interests and aspirations in the House of Representatives.
Botswana was one of the first three African countries to go for multiparty democracy when she became independent in 1966. The other two were Mauritius and Senegal. The rest of the newly independent states were one-party states. Progressive then she was a darling of Western democracies. She had rightly earned herself the sobriquet, ‘the shining example of democracy.’ In truth, the shininess of the country was exaggerated. It was based on the fact that her neighbour South Africa, claimed a bizarre kind of democracy which excluded the majority from the poll while her fellow-African newly-arrived at independence, spurned the indisputable tenet of multi-partism as the sine qua non of the democracy concept, by adopting a single-party system of which did not hold regular five-yearly general elections. The fact that the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) was so to speak, the police officer, the prosecutor and the judge since the process of elections was conducted by the Permanent Secretary to the President who was the supervisor of the elections and the adjudicator of the results, through the same Office - in other words performing the exercise of the general elections from start to finish – the regular elections counted for nothing and only helped the ruling BDP to master the art of winning the elections without pause.
