Politics is a dirty game

When people say politics is a dirty game, they are not simply out to denigrate the pursuit; they speak more or less the truth.

From the very first day I stepped into politics, its baseness was not only apparent; it was loudly asserted. I knew before I took the plunge that I was not joining apostolate, but I had certainly underestimated the extent of its depravity, truth to tell. After all, we were Batswana, a people not given to extremes of moral turpitude, more friendly than inimical, more affectionate than hating. It did not take me long to disabuse myself of this hallucinatory notion: I had given my people too much idiosyncratic credit. Even more tragic was that the machinations, which at the time were a byword of the politics of my party, were played out on me with particular vindictiveness: practically no one else bore the brunt of this onslaught to the same extent I did.