Gripen fighter jets or transparent ballot boxes?

The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) government, which is, and has been in power since our country attained "independence" from Great Britain in 1966 has always told us that transparent ballot boxes are too expensive to buy for our general elections.

Imagine how much more sensible it would be if the money now ear-marked for purchase of Gripen fighter jets were to be used for purchase of such transparent ballot boxes. The problem, of course is that transparent ballot boxes would make it extremely difficult to temper with the contents undetected, something that the BDP would never countenance!

Now that the Court of Appeal (CoA) has legitimised the BDP government by refusing to hear the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) petitions, I wonder why the UDC doesn't just publish what it found to be "irregularities" in the disputed 2019 elections. If they do not want to "show their hand" when the horse has already bolted from the stables, so to speak, then perhaps they should tell our people the truth, that no petition ever has a chance of succeeding where rigging must be successfully "linked" to either the winning candidate or his agent, for a petition against such a candidate to succeed under Botswana law.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Our tribes and totems

When the gods genetically re-engineered man, they allocated man to work-groups which we call tribes/nations today. Man was insulated from the political alignments of the gods. Man was just a worker who had to be protected from being swamped by Homo Naledi.Such was the community that lived on and around Mapungubwe hill. Some guards (Balindi/Balete) were placed at the top of the hill, while others were deployed at the bottom. The principal responsibility of the guards on the hill-top was to drop (ku liga) rocks on any enemy who might have breached the lower defences. Consequently the hill-top guards became known as "the droppers" (Baka Chiliga) [Boo Seleka in Setswana] Totems were assigned by the gods mostly to differentiate one work-group from another, but also to give humanity the upper hand in the survival stakes vis-a-vis Homo Naledi. The totems were mostly in the form of some animal that the assigned group was not allowed to eat or even touch. In the human survival sta...
Read more

Strange things in this world

Palestine/Israel:   The architects of Apartheid in South Africa insisted that they were implementing an "n" state solution where "n" is the number of independent states. Their "n" was composed of such Bantustans as BophutaTswana, Transkei, Ciskei, KwaZulu etc. We (rightly) vilified them and fought to destroy their unacceptable designs in our continent. Many people died in the process. Today people are advocating for the creation of another "n" state solution with "n=2" in Palestine/Israel. They call it a 2 state solution. Hendrick Vervoed must be dancing in his grave! Botswana: UDC vs IEC I listened to part of the judgement reading. An interesting point made was that if the UDC were granted the right to observe the voter registration, then other political actors (presumably, BDP, BCP etc) would also be so granted. Now this is strange, because the government insists that ONLY the 94 or so Basarwa who sued and won the right to stay in the...
Read more

What's wrong with Botswana cartoonists?

I mean here is a guy, on the eve of his becoming president, and he comes wearing the most ridiculous looking cap bedecked with medals; an absolute cartoonists paradise, surpassed if at all, only by Jean Bedell Bokasa's coat! And guess what, it's been two months now that he has been making decisions affecting all our lives, and not one cartoon of him wearing that ridiculous hat has appeared in the mainline press. All we get are almost exact replicas of his photoshoots, or selfies as they are called nowadays! Come on guys what do you think we live in - a Banana republic or what?
Read more