President Ian Khama\u2019s bid to appoint his brother, Tshekedi Khama, as deputy-president has been thwarted as\u00a0Botswana\u2019s government says it will accept a court ruling to counter the move.<\/p>\n
Khama, re-elected for a second term last month, wanted lawmakers to vote by a show of hands for his deputy, instead of through a secret ballot.<\/p>\n
A show of hands\u00a0would have exposed any who opposed his choice.<\/p>\n
Khama had faced a backlash from within his own party over the prospect of Tshekedi as\u00a0deputy-president, with parliamentarians accusing the president of trying to create a dynasty.<\/p>\n
Botswana\u2019s High Court on Friday that deemed only a secret parliamentary ballot constitutional. \u201cA secret ballot is a hallmark of a free and fair election within our representative democracy,\u201d said Justice Michael Leburu in the Gaborone High Court.<\/p>\n
The executive issued a statement late on Tuesday, saying: \u201cGovernment accepts that the matter has been resolved and wishes to assure the public that it will respect and fully implement the decision of the court.\u201d<\/p>\n
Opposition party lawyers say\u00a0that the same voting process had been in place unchallenged for years, and was used to endorse Khama as deputy-president in 1999 and 2004.<\/p>\n
Botswana went to the polls last month in elections that saw the BDP winning with less than 50% of the vote for the first time since it came to power in 1966.<\/p>\n
Though the country is routinely held up as a paragon of good governance on the continent, its ruling party has been criticised recently for attempts to stifle dissent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Ian Khama\u2019s bid to appoint his brother, Tshekedi Khama, as deputy-president has been thwarted as\u00a0Botswana\u2019s government says it will accept a court ruling to counter the move. Khama, re-elected for a second term last month, wanted lawmakers to vote by a show of hands for his deputy, instead of through a secret ballot. A … Continue reading “Khama’s attempt to appoint brother as deputy fails”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[626,10184,10386],"class_list":["post-16827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-south-africa","tag-botswana","tag-deputy-president","tag-ian-khama"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16828,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16827\/revisions\/16828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}