Democracy
The international observer missions have made their pronouncements on the conduct of the elections. Unfortunately they usually come at the tail end of a long process and evaluate the event. Some come from political cultures where the concept of fairness is defined differently depending on the dictates of the moment, and the rule of law is an unknown phenomenon. Such people will always give Botswana's general elections a free and fair verdict. We all know and the BDP knows that they had more than a fair share of the use of government media before and after the writ of elections was announced. We also know that in the last two weeks in the run up to the Election Day the BDP rallies enjoyed an unfair share of BTV coverage. When namola leuba jobs are created overnight and dished out in Gaborone South to coincide with the elections, under the guise of poverty alleviation we are creating a cargo cult mentality amongst our people - the belief among hungry people that on the election eve a fairy ship will dock in their harbor laden with every goody they have always dreamed of possessing.
When people in Bobirwa, after suffering for so long from the influx of Zimbabwean criminals who rustled their livestock into Zimbabwe, raped the women folk and commandeered their fields, can only get some relief from the deployment of the BDF on the election eve, after the visitation by the Vice-President of this country, that is also not fair. I hope that when the 2009 general elections dust has settled the IEC will do a dispassionate postmortem of the election process to get to the bottom of the glaring clerical errors in the voters roll which disenfranchised a lot of voters. Many people were returned from the polling station for this error.
