Mmegi

Boko’s second republic

Boko PIC: MORERI SEJAKGOMO
Boko PIC: MORERI SEJAKGOMO

The election euphoria in the air masks the unbelievable feat that just happened before our eyes. Many people of the blue persuasion are beside themselves with joy.

Why shouldn't they be? After all they have managed to banish Botswana’s Good Old Party from the power, we have all thought it is contiguous with the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). The man of the moment is without doubt the incoming Commander-in-Chief and the UDC party president, Duma Boko. He is the tip of an arrow that slayed the 58 old behemoth of Botswana politics. Who can argue with the UDC supporters when they christen their hero a political visionary and strategist? He upstaged luminaries such as Philip Matante and Kenneth Koma, revolutionaries who could not incubate and carry the struggle to full term in their life time.

The possible debilitating demise of the BDP had possibly been long in coming. Its genesis must have been hatched in 2010 when Boko became the President of the Botswana National Front (BNF) and subsequently engaged into a political courtship with Botswana’s oldest political party, the Botswana People’s Party, the Botswana Congress Party and the then newest political formation, the Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD) of the charismatic Gomolemo Motswaledi into an opposition alliance christened Umbrella Democratic Change (UDC). The UDC itself has gone through metamorphoses, evolution, transformation, self-renewal, and political exfoliation that threatened to dismember its core. Boko, the UDC’s chief priest and philosopher king, is enthusiastically credited for his long suffering and enduring spirit to not only mid-wife the UDC but to zealously fashion it as a potent political force that withstood the internal tempests that saw the BMD break apart and twice the ‘I walk-away’ and ‘now I am coming back’ postures of the Botswana Congress Party and lately the disaffection of former President Ian Khama’s Botswana Patriotic Front (BPF).

These were major setbacks and somehow Boko convinced himself and the UDC that there is life without the BCP, and later the BPF. Very few people really saw the pathway to victory of the UDC, particularly without the BCP with its swathe of support in Bobirwa, Tswapong and the North West and Chobe enclave. Without the backing of Bangwato ‘King’, Khama, in the constituency rich Gammangwato heartlands, the UDC campaign was considered speculative in 31 constituencies of the northern part of Botswana and bereft of political tact. Yes, the UDC had been winning by-elections without the BCP! They excited the youth, and their message seemed to resonate with the poor and the working class. The big question though was whether the UDC could reignite the North without the support of both the UDC and the BPF? The UDC campaign did not take off until late in the night; Boko had to cram all his launches into one long fell swoop. Between the last Saturday and Tuesday before the general elections, he did launches in Mogobane, on the same day, he together with his Vice President were launched. Two days before the elections, he had to travel by road, a punishing road trip from Gaborone to Charles Hill, Maun, Letlhakane, Shoshong, Mookane, Machaneng, Lerala and Mahalapye in a whistle stop final push.

To the uninitiated, this did not resemble an oiled campaign machine but one that was over-exerting its chief campaigner. The man himself seemed to be enjoying himself on the stump, he connected with people and revealed a new phase, ‘I am your boy’. This resonated and seemed to endear himself to his own folks in his home village. It felt like the same approach that RraKgosi Bathoen made when he turned Kanye into the spiritual shrine of the BNF, or what Seretse Khama and later Ian Khama made Serowe the BDP, and now the BPF fortress; the same way President Masisi has built an invisible camp in Moshupa. Perhaps taking the cue from his forerunners, Boko was on a spiritual journey to set up a political altar in Mahalapye on the final leg of his campaign. For all of his many virtues, Boko had been carrying the baggage and the unenviable tag of an aloof intellectual who does not suffer fools. At the Presidential debate, he did more than shed off the tag, he weaved his terse but adroitly cloistered message of human rights based development on one side of the tongue while on the other side of the tongue he had to muck-rake the damage of the 2019 presidential debate.

He passed that tight-rope and banished the 2019 monkey in that homecoming address when he continued the refrain of ‘Ke mofokodi wa lona’. He passed as an ordinary guy, a broken guy. Nobody can be broken and arrogant at the same time. In the last few weeks, the nation saw this affable, easy-going man on stage. In recent interviews, Boko’s wife has opened up another inner comport of the man, that he is deeply spiritual. On the campaign trail he is shown singing along hymns and religious songs and he occasionally quote scriptures that undergird his life. Other than the meticulous war plan to win a political campaign, including marshalling a team of Madibela Tlhopho and other reconnaissance issues. In between all these heavy stuff, he seemed to have been harbouring and nursing a deep spiritual conviction that the moment we have all witnessed -the UDC winning majority seats- was first sculptured in a realm bigger and superior to the physical realm where we play our lives out. In 2015, at a church conference, he was given a prophesy that he will lead this nation. “Your moment has come,” the preacher had said to a thunderous applause.

Almost 10 years later, the prophesy has come to pass. It seems this prophecy took a life of its own in the mind of the incoming President. This was calcified in his mind, he lived it, and he expended every part of his fibre and sinew to actualise this reality - the reality not just to replace a political class but the desire to introduce a second republic with its ambitious social transformation to eradicate poverty.

Editor's Comment
A step in the right direction

It has only been a month since the newly elected government, the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), took power, and there are already a lot of changes. Across different ministries, ministers are hard at work. Following heavy rainfall and storms that hit Francistown recently, the Minister of State Presidency, Moeti Mohwasa, made a commitment that government will assist those affected by the heavy rains. Mohwasa, when addressing the media in...

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