This will be my last comment on the South Africa elections and will hopefully not attract controversy, just an observation that we can all learn from. In South Africa, they use an electoral system called proportional representation. Under this system, the country is not divided into constituencies such as the case in Botswana. Instead, the total votes received throughout the country are tallied and your percentage of the total votes allows you a proportion of seats in parliament. That is why even parties that did not dominate or come close to position 5 in any of the provinces are able to get seats in Parliament, which is good for diversity of views in the legislature. A total of 13 political parties will be represented in the South African Parliament, allowing most interest groups to have a say. Agang SA with 0.28% of the vote will be able to get 2 seats to represent those who think it best represents their concerns. If you were to apply the same system to the Botswana 2009 election results, the BDP would have got 30 seats and not the 45 that they won. The BNF would have been at 12 and not 6 while the BCP would also have been allocated 12 seats instead of the 5 seats we won with BAM. BPP would also have possibly secured a seat. The moral of the story is, the electoral system plays a major part in deciding who wins and by what margin. Election observers who have in the past observed the Botswana elections have advised that Botswana should reconsider its electoral system to bring fairness in the way seats are allocated after an election. The BDP has refused to allow for debate on the electoral system because it allocates their party more seats than is justified by the votes they receive. The BCP manifesto promises to introduce a new electoral system called Mixed Member Proportional Representation. This is a system that combines the strengths of Proportional Representation and the Constituency based system that we currently use in Botswana.
Posted on: Wed, 14 May 2014 08:18:26 +0000
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