The man was haden and couldn’t mince his words but spoke his mind to the chagrin of his seemingly shocked party colleagues and UDC diehards. Some even called for his party to unleash its disciplinary machinery on him. The man was unperturbed by such calls. “We are in opposition,” he reiterated his stance this week in an interview with Mmegi. “People should be honest. We had wanted to work cooperatively with the UDC, but the distribution of constituencies and wards was a spoiler.” It was the then BPF president, Mephato Reatile, who made the final decision by pulling the BPF from coalition talks with the UDC. That the Boko-led administration has included two of BPF MPs as Assistant Ministers, Lawrence Ookeditse and Baratiwa Mathoothe, does not, according to Lesedi, make the BPF a legitimate part of the UDC coalition. “There is no deal at all.” Lesedi is aware of calls to discipline him for holding such a strong position that the BPF should stop behaving like it’s part of the ruling party, “We are not.” Nothing he says will stop him from articulating a position of his constituents on national issues, as he is part of the 13th Parliament because of the people he represents. “I represent the people and not myself. In my second term now, I understand the people, and they understand me.” He stresses that he doesn’t have any contract with the UDC but with the people who watch his every move on the national Botswana Television and listen to his voice on state-owned Radio Botswana when he debates in Parliament. He insists that if the UDC were to even offer him a position in its government like his other two colleagues, “I will diametrically decline, especially without a blessing from my people”.
The MP has, however, indicated that where there is evidence that the UDC is failing the people, he will not stop speaking the truth to power. He insists he cannot look the other way when he has to hold the powerful accountable. If Serowe South legislator Leepetswe Lesedi’s names are anything to go by, the negative connotations derived from his first name, which roughly translated means ‘it has been interred’, whilst the surname means light. However, the Botswana Patriotic Front (BPF) Serowe South third legislator, since independence in 1966, says his names have no bearing on his personality. In the vernacular, Setswana, the way the names are arranged, it suggests that his light (destiny) has been concealed. “There is no reflection from any sphere of my life that my names have a direct bearing on my progression in life,” thundered the energetic Lesedi, who rose to the MP position from the 12th Parliament in 2019 and is in his second five-year term representing the people of Serowe South constituency. His career in politics started like wildfire shortly after he had resigned from the Botswana Police Service (BPS), where he had served as a detective in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) branch. It was a case of being at the right place at the right time. After his exit from the BPS in 2002, he registered for and won the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) primary elections as a candidate for the 2004 General Election, and he would later win the Manonnye ward council seat. In 2009, he lost the party primaries for the same council seat. He would later contest as an independent candidate and lost the national polls. He had contested under the name, ‘Setimamolelo’.
