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).
