Duma Boko

Early life and career

Growing up in a rural village where toys, television sets, and a family vehicle were a luxury that could engender envy among neighbours, owning such could catapult one to celebrity status. It was even a huge achievement if such a toy was a typewriter.

When he was growing up in the Xhosa One Ward in Mahalapye, Duma Boko was this boy. He was so brilliant, knowledgeable, and most importantly confident in whatever he set out to do. To add to that self-assurance was the fact that his father was working at a good paying job at the time – a lecturer at Madiba Brigades. He raised Duma and her sister Emma until his passing in 2004. As a Form Four student he almost embarrassed one teacher when he brought over 20 pages of a document in which he had written about Leon Trotsky.

In 1987 Boko relocated to Gaborone for his law studies at University of Botswana (UB). Already a firebrand, he was immediately elected into the UB Student Representative Council (SRC). Among his law classmates were High Court judges Michael Leburu, Key Dingake, Bengbame Sechele, Lot Moroka, and others who pursued careers outside law practice after school.After graduating in 1993, he went to further his studies at the prestigious Harvard University in the United States of America, before returning to teach Law at University of Botswana, simultaneously operating a law firm. Some of the judges incurred the wrath of Boko’s mighty pen in his column in the early 2000s in The Monitor when he accused them of being backward and not intellectually progressive. Boko was frustrated that academics at the university, and judges were not doing enough research work to make informed arguments, or judgments. Between 2005 and 2006 Boko was part of the legal team representing Basarwa who were challenging their relocation from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve(CKGR). The judgment that was passed on December 13, 2006, can best be described as a 50/50 outcome for government and Basarwa. But Boko surprised a packed High Court in a different case in 2007 when he was defending two men who were facing the death penalty. Michael Molefhe – a South African, and Brandon Sampson – from Gantsi were appearing before Justice Maruping Dibotelo for sentencing after a long trial that attracted the attention of the media

Political activism and Politics

Boko’s ascendency to the leadership of the Botswana National Front (BNF) was anything but easy. His detractors challenged his presidency in court alleging then, and they still maintain to this very day, that when the BNF split in 2000, he became a founding member of the resultant splinter party, the National Democratic Front (NDF). If proven, this would, according to the BNF constitution, disqualify him from a leadership position in the party for the duration of three years after rejoining it. He prevailed over his detractors in court and went on to become president of the party in July 2010 at the party congress in Mochudi. . First, he inherited a party that was in the decline after going into the 2009 general elections in a tattered state under the leadership of Otsweletse Moupo who has since quit politics to join the civil service. Due to the poor results, which yielded only five members of Parliament, including losing some constituencies it had held for decades to the ruling party, the BNF wallowed in a challenging period. Boko’s election in July 2010 at the Mochudi congress, and a confirmation at the Gantsi meet two years later, was followed by a string of conflicts, lawsuits in which some members claimed that he did not possess the BNF membership.

Others tried to hold Boko against his public pronouncement that he has never voted in any general election. The route became even steeper when the BNF came together with the newly formed Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD), a splinter of the BDP made of disgruntled former members and the Botswana Peoples Party to form the UDC. Some BNF members who claimed to love the party more than anybody else were strongly against the coalition, arguing that the exercise would make their party disappear from the country’s history books. A number of lawsuits against Boko and his central committee were laid before the High Court, but none of them deterred him from establishing what is now the Umbrella for Democratic Change. In fact, in the last three years, Boko and the BNF won all the court challenges, something that seemed to revive and reinvigorate the party and its members. Nothing deviate his dream of a strong opposition that will ultimately unseat the ruling BDP. For the first time in two decades, the ruling party is faced with serious competition from the opposition.For the first time opposition candidates are using branded buses to sell their parties to the electorate in all parts of the country. For the first time, the presidential candidates are flying in choppers to meet and greet their potential voters, something that the ruling party has enjoyed unchallenged, albeit using military aircraft at the taxpayer’s expense.

Personal life

He is friends with American actor Rick Yune.