The BNF - Opportunities and challenges

| Friday August 2, 2013 00:00

 

Thirty-six months ago almost to the day the membership of our organisation met in Mochudi to elect a new leadership. They also met to take stock of their organisation and give it direction. The lead up to the Mochudi elective Congress was characterised by roaring firestorms of controversy, adversity and uncertainty. Ours was an organisation in turmoil; trapped and enmeshed in a thick tangle of internal squabbles. These threatened not just the credibility and stability of our organisation but its very existence if allowed to fester on unattended.

The organisation had survived bitter feuds which had seen the expulsion of some members. We had witnessed toxic exchanges between cadres taking place in public, in complete disregard of any bounds of decency and respect; far from any structures and organs of the party. The party was tugged and pulled from all angles by these vicious furies of its members. Members were pitted against each other and in defiance of the then leadership. 

All these scenes of unmitigated indiscipline intensified as the party prepared for the 2009 General elections. The party became something of a reservoir for small talk and gossip. The most sustained campaigns carried out in the period leading up to the 2009 elections were directed against the party and its leadership by cadres and activists of the party. Insults were generously traded by members much to the horror of the voter and the scornful merriment of our adversaries on the political play field.

I mention these distasteful experiences in order to underscore the fact that the BNF has now been so besmirched and denuded by some of its own members that is has been cast in the mind of the voter as a party with an uncanny aversion to tranquility and stability. This impression is fed and fueled by the unacceptable behaviour of some of the members of the party. 

The Mochudi Congress also took place in the wake of a dismal electoral performance in the General elections of 2009. In speaking to the verdict delivered by the electorate in those elections I noted in a previous analysis that the voter had expressed a corrosive skepticism in the ability of our organisation to steer clear of internal strife.This had eroded our credibility as an organisation and made us unappealing to the voter.

Our Congress in Mochudi also took place against the background of several attempts, in the past, to forge a bond of unity amongst opposition parties in Botswana. Our organisation had participated in these efforts. Our Congress interpreted the failure of these previous efforts and gave clear and unequivocal instructions to the leadership it was due to elect. It called on all to declare their stance on the burning issue of opposition unity. All of us contesting for leadership declared our commitment to unity with other opposition parties and pledged to work tirelessly toward the attainment of this unity.

The Congress elected and resolved. It resolved that the leadership undertake negotiations with other willing opposition parties in order to attain the elusive unity. The Congress was astute to state that no constraints were imposed on the leadership in this quest for unity save that the soul of the BNF must be maintained. In doing so the Congress eschewed an approach pursued previously in which there were strictures regarding the model of cooperation to be followed. This had left the leadership with absolutely no play at the joints in regard to its negotiations with other parties.

The newly elected leadership embarked on the tasks entrusted to it with vigour. It established a team of able cadres to represent the party at the negotiations. These eminent individuals undertook their assignment with dedication and were principled in their pursuit of the goal of opposition unity. They were chosen on the basis of their repertory of skills and abilities. The team was led by Comrade David Rendoh, a career diplomat. They did a sterling job.

The Mochudi Congress ushered in an era of sustained calm and stability within our organisation. Comrades who had previously been expelled on the basis of the squabbles that engulfed the party were pardoned and reinstated as full members. Reconciliation was largely achieved and stability restored. The credibility of the party was also restored. It is this calm, stability and credibility that the party must guard jealously. Our party went into the cooperation talks with other opposition parties more stable and credible. The party was clearly on a resurgence and, in this state, deserved and rightly commanded the respect of other parties.

As in any delicate and complex negotiations, challenges were met along the way. The most engaging was, ironically, the least difficult of issues by comparison. Policies and their harmonisation formed the pith of the success or failure of the talks. This issue was settled quickly and without difficulty. The model of cooperation had been discussed and, after acceptance and endorsement by the Tsabong Conference, duly agreed and adopted by all negotiating parties.

The parties settled and agreed the policies of their united formation without any difficulty. The policy framework adopted was the Social Democratic programme or social democracy championed by the BNF. All the negotiating parties converged and coalesced around social democracy. The stage was thus set for the conclusion of the talks as the main issues had been successfully agreed.

It is now a matter of public record that one of the negotiating parties withdrew from the talks on the basis of disagreements regarding the allocation of constituencies. At the time only five constituencies were involved. The rest had been settled and workable compromises reached. The rest of the parties later resumed the talks and established the agreed Umbrella for Democratic Change which united these parties and enabled them, as recommended at the talks, to contest the 2014 elections as one unit under the banner and symbol of the Umbrella.The BNF is now part of the Umbrella and the Umbrella stands at the threshold of change. We stand on the right side of history; poised to bring about regime change to this country if we take this calling of history with the seriousness it merits.

The state of our partyFollowing our Congress in Mochudi the party enjoyed a period of sustained calm and stability. This enabled us to play an active and meaningful role in the opposition cooperation talks. In fact, the party distinguished itself by remaining focused on the goal of attaining opposition unity and avoided all the pitfalls of what had, in previous talks, been called the Big Brother mentality. For this our party received gracious acknowledgements from many honest commentators.This calm was somewhat disturbed when certain individuals in the Central Committee engaged in acts of willful defiance of resolutions of the party and its Central Committee. The then Vice President, together with some members of the Central Committee, conspired to undermine and violate decisions of the Central Committee and colluded with external forces to destabilise the party.

The party took immediate action and crushed this internal rebellion of wayward Central Committee members.Order was restored in the interim pending a Special Congress of the party that was held in Mahalapye.The Special Congress took decisive steps which saw the expulsion of two members of the party who were identified as chief instigators of indiscipline in the party. Most of the Central Committee members who formed the frontline of the mutiny against the party had resigned from the Central Committee and most had, in fact, left the party, with one joining the ruling Botswana Democratic Party while the others returned to or joined the Botswana Congress Party. The Congress laid down the brightlines: indiscipline and divisive conduct would no longer be tolerated in the BNF. The stability of the party is sacrosanct.

The party held a Conference in Kanye from 14-17 July 2012 and continued along the same path of restoring and maintaining stability. I must remind you, Congress, that the Kanye Conference addressed another issue that had become troubling. A few party members had resumed their old habits of attacking the party in the public media and on social networks. A handful of individuals had turned themselves into Facebook enemies of the party. Not a day passed without postings by these individuals attacking the party and its leadership.The Kanye Conference condemned the conduct of these individuals and warned that the sternest measures would be applied to them. I would like to state, Congress, that this conduct still persists. The same individuals have not only continued their attacks against the party on Facebook, they have intensified such attacks. In their jockeying for pre-eminence they transgress all the known lines of respect and decency. Their insults against the party and its leadership ring irritatingly like the shrill noises of a thousand mosquitoes.

What makes the conduct of these elements even more treacherous is that all avenues are open within the structures of the party to raise whatever issues or grievances they may have in a manner that helps the party and assists the leadership. They deliberately shun these structures in order to engage in malicious and unprincipled attacks against the leadership.Their conduct marks and defines a malady that is beginning to reappear in the party where members ignore the channels of communication within the party and take their issues to the media, in the process tarnishing the good image of the party and eroding its good standing in the eyes of the voters. Such individuals are enemies of the party and all that it stands for.

The BNF is an organisation founded on the principle, among others, of democratic centralism. The party convenes Conferences and Congresses to take decisions and elect its leadership in accordance with its Constitution. Once elected, the leadership speaks for the party. Any attack on social networks, the media or elsewhere, by members and cadres who have deliberately failed or refused to avail themselves of the appropriate channels of airing grievances and discussing issues with the party deserves the most serious sanction.Those who undermine the party and insult its leadership display total disrespect for the organisation and must be removed from the party so they can piss at it from outside. Their boisterous denunciations can better be dealt with if they are carried out from outside the party. Then the party may, at its discretion engage with these insults in the same platforms in which they are hurled.

It is a source of grave shame that the most vicious attacks against the party are launched not by our political adversaries but by a handful of our own members and activists. They seem to believe that fame and fortune lies in raining their unvarnished vulgarity on the party and its leadership. If we do not act now, and decisively, to purge such elements and remove them from our midst we will forever be embroiled in needless petty but toxic squabbles that weaken the party and render it completely unattractive to the voter.The cyclical squabbles that often engulf the party are the product, in the main, of the failure by many intellectuals who claim to be on the left of the political spectrum, to appreciate that they are mesmerised by two main master images. The first image is that of the role of philosopher-kings which these intellectuals abrogate to themselves. In terms of this image, they see themselves as entitled to exercise power and force their influence on organisations by virtue simply of their belief that they possess the correct theory and their views must be regarded as gospel.

The second master image is that they believe themselves to be the wielders of 'the lightning of philosophy' that must strike into the virgin soil of the minds of the masses. One needs only to familiarise themselves with the writings of Karl Marx in his 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right' to understand the genesis and manifestation of these images. The images have become master fallacies in our political landscape and enabled many of our intellectuals, on the basis merely of their second rate imitations of Marx, Engels and Lenin, to imagine themselves to be superior to the masses. It is this imagined superiority that leads many of these intellectuals to disregard party structures and processes and beam their banalities in the media. They have become a cult of immaturity.

The most mature intellectuals are those who appreciate that our organisation has processes that must be respected. Our organisation is a mass organisation; busy mobilising all people; workers, farmers, business people, people of all religions, students, traditional leaders; everybody into a united force that will dominate representative democratic institutions in the prosecution of the National Democratic Revolution. I will do well at this point to restate what I asserted at the Kanye Conference. I noted that there are some elements among us in the BNF who still cling to the myth of the BNF being a Socialist party. They are opposed to the organisation establishing or acknowledging any affinities, let alone forging a common bond of outlook and vision with the Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD) and others. They construct their faulty ideological edifice on a failure to appreciate the dialectics of transformation and regeneration articulated by Comrade Kenneth Koma.  It is these ideologues who advance a theory of ideological Puritanism in which the BNF is presented as a Socialist party which must not come into networks of cooperation with other political formations. They are vehemently opposed to the Umbrella and have now taken to masking their opposition by raising allegations that are a tribute to total dishonesty.

They now want to hold the BNF hostage over the issue of the allocation of Constituencies; the same issue over which we have consistently criticised the BCP and chided it over its lack of commitment to unity. Some of the individuals fancy themselves running for Parliament and the allocations are impugned for no other reason than that they deny them the opportunity to contest. These individuals fail to see the Umbrella as a vehicle for the attainment of the imperative to organisationally transform ourselves into a dynamic united front. The Umbrella presents, in ideational terms, a structure or vehicle forged by separate but compatible organisations, resulting from a properly negotiated menu of policies and programmes which galvanises these organisations into a united fighting force for 2014 and beyond. It is the rich diversity of this unity that will assure the emancipation of Botswana in 2014 and beyond.

Issues have also been raised regarding the symbol to be used in the coming elections and allegations levelled that the UDC symbol has been rejected by the IEC. This is malicious and dishonest in the extreme.  The registration of the UDC symbol must be preceded by the registration of the various party symbols as Trademarks in order to legally secure and fortify them against any malcontents who may want to contest under them. Once this registration is done, these symbols will then be properly withdrawn so that the only symbol registered with the IEC is that of the Umbrella.

I must pause here to share the preliminary findings of a study conducted by our Umbrella partners BMD. The findings state that the Umbrella, contesting as such, has the opportunity to win at least 32 percent more votes from voters who say they are waiting for the Umbrella to present its message and policy offerings to them and to demonstrate that it is a durable entity that will endure well after the 2014 elections. The voters are saying it is up to us as the Umbrella to present ourselves to them and they are ready, willing and yearning to vote for us.The study reveals something else which we have known but ignored over many years. Our message and policy offerings must be presented to the electorate not in political rallies, which have become the latest vogue practice in our party. The message must be presented in sustained house to house and community meetings where the voters can engage with us meaningfully and ask questions.

The study concludes further that the voter in the 2014 elections rejects any electioneering that focuses on individuals and wants to hear concrete answers to real problems facing the country. The voter wants to see stability both in the contesting organisations and reassurances that the country will not be plunged into chaos and instability. It is for these reasons that the stability of our organisation must be understood by all members to be most sacrosanct and must be preserved. It has the potential to inspire confidence in our organisation and offer the assurances the voters are looking for. In-fighting and petty squabbling over constituencies will only bring about a diminution of the credibility that the party has steadily regained over the last three years. Vacuous rhetoric must give way to practical involvement with the people. Activists must retreat from Facebook and descend into the streets and pavements of our cities and townships to spread the message of the Umbrella.

On other fronts the party continues to struggle financially, operating on a dwindling income stream which comprises just the monthly contributions of its elected representatives and handouts from the occasional donor.Members are failing to honour their financial obligations to the party.We were able, under the Presidency and with the involvement of the Publicity Secretary to gather a number of Comrades who are either in business or gainful employment and whose identities may not be revealed, to create a focus group that will contribute monthly toward the funding of certain specific projects within the party. This group is still nascent but should generate an additional source of assistance toward the funding of targeted projects.

We extend the invitation to others in their own localities to establish similar clusters and make monthly contributions to assist the party take care of its recurrent expenditure. Unfortunately the most prolific in terms of generating negative publicity for the party are the least helpful to the party when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are.The party has acquired a membership card printing machine obtained through the personal resources of the President. This machine was intended to assist the party print the membership cards that were to be sold off at P 1,000 a card to generate funds for the party. The response from members has been less than encouraging. The idea was to raise at least P 1000 000 from the first 1,000 cards. Members are still urged to dip their hands into their pockets and acquire these cards and in so doing generously assist the party's fund raising efforts.

BOKO is President of Botswana National Front. This is an abridged part of the speech he presented at the recent National Congress held in Ghanzi.