S'THEMBISO MSOMI | Botswana president's observations about SA should not be dismissed without engagement

It is a pity that, as the biggest economy in the southern African region, SA does not have enough media resources to keep a keen eye on our immediate neighbours and how they see us.

We pay scant attention to developments in neighbouring countries, only remembering that they exist when something major happens, such as a rebel attack in northern Mozambique or a riot sparked by a populist politician who can’t accept that he lost.

Hence, most of us were taken by surprise when a 53-year-old-man with a name we hardly recognised, and a political party we dismissed as too tiny, was announced as the winner of last year’s elections in Botswana.

For weeks after that, Duma Boko’s name – and that of his Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) – was on everybody’s lips.

South African opposition parties of all hues were falling over each other in their rush to meet Boko in the hope that his shine would rub off on them.

To them, the UDC’s surprising victory over the Botswana Democratic Party, which had ruled the diamond-rich country since independence, was a beacon of hope that they too could soon unseat the ANC.

But, within months, all had swiftly moved on to the next story – Botswana was soon a distant memory.

As a result, we have not fully reflected on what led to Boko’s and the UDC’s success at the polls and the lessons that can be gained from that for an SA that has entered a phase where no single party enjoys enough public support to govern alone.

The UDC, lest we forget, is a coalition of several political parties, including Boko’s left-leaning Botswana National Front (BNF). They came together because, individually, they considered themselves too small to take on the then-giant ruling BDP.

Perhaps it is still too soon to say if Boko’s coalition government is succeeding in delivering the type of Botswana it promised to the electorate, but he has been making some interesting noises about South African politics that we should not dismiss without engagement.

Speaking at a BNF elective conference a week ago, Boko made an impassioned plea for South African parties to “come together” and “strike compromises”, before warning that “[Nazi Germany’s Adolf] Hitler may be rising” in SA.

“A different kind of Hitler ... it impels the present leadership of SA to rise above the personal, the trivial and the absurd and recognise the existential threat that faces that country and all of us. Some of you call it monopoly capital; whatever name you ascribe to it, there is a threat looming. It threatens you, it threatens all of us.

“It seems to me, and I am no expert on your politics, [that] it calls for a careful reflection on the approach henceforth. Economic Freedom Fighters, the African National Congress ... all of them must step up to step back and reflect on the existential threat that faces their country and the rest of the region and, of course, the continent”. 

The South African contingent at the conference included representatives of the ANC, the SA Communist Party, the EFF and trade union federations. What did each of them think of Boko’s call, one wondered, especially in the context of the government of national unity set-up.

But more importantly, who or what is this South African-based “different kind of Hitler” that Boko says is threatening the country and the southern African region?

Had the warning come from one of the several former national liberation movements meeting the ANC in Gauteng this week, perhaps it would have been easy to dismiss as the usual dog-whistle by ruling parties desperate to excuse their decades of misrule by pointing their finger at big and white business.

But Boko is new and, by the region’s standards, relatively young. His coalition is not born out of national liberation politics. So what is it that he has seen in a space of a year that makes him conclude that SA and the southern African region face an existential threat?

Given that he presides over a diamond-rich country and that SA is a mining giant and given the fact that he used the term “monopoly capital” about this “different kind of Hitler”, are we to deduce from all of this that it has to do with the mining industry? Hopefully, Boko will soon be granting interviews in which he’ll explain further.

However, given that SA seems to be slowly becoming a target of hostility from the US administration, and that much of that hostility seems to be fuelled by players from within our borders, Boko may be on to something and political parties with a real interest in defending the country’s sovereignty should listen carefully to what he is saying.