Behind the curtain, BDP’s old guard closes ranks around Balopi

They move quietly, these grey-haired custodians of the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), working the phones and the private rooms rather than the podiums. A cadre of veteran B.D.P. elders has launched a discreet, behind-the-scenes campaign to keep a simmering leadership crisis from tearing the party apart – and, at the heart of their effort, to keep one embattled man in his chair.

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The elders have thrown their weight behind the party president, Mpho Balopi, urging him to hold firm against a swelling chorus demanding that he step aside. The pressure erupted after the Directorate of Public Prosecutions filed criminal charges against him, and the veterans are treating any hasty exit as a wound the party can ill afford to inflict on itself.

Sources familiar with the manoeuvring say the elders have privately assured Mr. Balopi of their support, insisting that the presidency is not his to surrender on a whim. He was, they argue, installed by the party’s own machinery, and only that machinery may release him.

“For him to step aside, he has an obligation to consult all party structures and obtain approval from those structures that elected him into office,” one elder told WeekendPost, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The intervention lands at a combustible moment. What was once whispered has spilled into open view, with the B.D.P. now visibly split over Mr. Balopi’s fate; one camp clamouring for his resignation, another adamant that he must remain at the helm.

The elders reserve some of their sharpest reproach for rivals beyond their own ranks. They accuse the Botswana National Front of stoking the turbulence engulfing the party, and have laid a share of the blame at the feet of President Duma Boko and the former president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, for the troubles now besetting the B.D.P.

Their aim, the veterans insist, is nothing less than the survival of the party – its stability today and its fortunes tomorrow. “We are very serious about our party and will defend it as elders and ensure that the party is back on track and wins the 2029 general election with a clean sheet,” one said.

For now, they guard their own identities as carefully as they guard the party. The group has declined to name its members, citing a fear of being singled out by the governing Umbrella for Democratic Change. Anonymity, they say, is a matter of survival: advancing in years and, by their own account, ill-equipped to withstand the rough edges of political retaliation, they would rather stay in the shadows.

They may yet step into the light, the elders suggest, once the present storm has passed and the political temperature has cooled.

The quarrel has drawn fire from the B.N.F. as well. Its vice president and Minister of State in the Presidency, Moeti Mohwasa, accused the B.D.P. of pointing fingers at the U.D.C. government for ailments that, he argued, first took root during the party’s own long tenure in power.

Mr. Mohwasa went further, claiming that the B.D.P. is being handled more gently in opposition than the B.N.F. ever was in the same wilderness years. He made the remarks at a news conference in Gaborone last Wednesday.

Yet the decisive contest is unfolding not between parties but within one. The question of whether Mr. Balopi keeps his grip on the leadership is fast becoming a defining test of the B.D.P.’s cohesion.

The dispute traces back to the prosecutors’ decision to charge Mr. Balopi and his co-accused, in a case that reportedly folds in allegations of fraud and money laundering — a legal cloud now hanging over a party still searching for its footing.

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