Street vendors and the vote

Staff Writer | Friday January 10, 2014 16:12

This is because while the right to vote includes the right not to exercise the vote, universal adult suffrage is the most fundamental tool available to Batswana who are, to be true, disenfranchised in every other sense. For this reason, we find that it would be an exercise in frivolity for anyone to baulk at the ballot box because with the vast majority of Batswana being on the periphery of a highly capitalist economy that is run by a compradore class, they hardly have any other means of expressing themselves politically.

It is a sorrowful reality that in our country, the centre of this compradore class is made up of the same people who constitute both the ruling class and the business class which acts primarily as native agents of foreign capitalists. Naturally, it is in their interest to minimise the cost of labour and to present Batswana to potential investors accordingly.

The habitual harassment of vendors and other peripheral survivors whose source of vitality springs from their unbelievable power of endurance is the most eloquent illustration of this alienation of the majority of Batswana.

We have a grotesque, if also manifest, picture here: The upmarket shopping malls are deliberately designed to keep ordinary Batswana and certainly vendors out.

 Elsewhere, inside the stores are people of nations and races other than African and Tswana while the latter ‘litter’ the pavement outside under sun-bleached umbrellas and makeshift structures.

This, dear Batswana, is the reality of our insouciantly tolerant and democratic country where wealth is identified with race and the compradore class and the rest are underlings who must be thankful that they still live.

 This is the world’s No. 3 most unequal society after South Africa and Namibia where, until recently, apartheid ensured racial inequality. This is the Republic of Botswana where race relations are officially hunky-dory and any suggestion to the contrary is strongly verboten. 

  But we must indeed all be sincerely thankful that we have the vote, which is the most vital tool in our hands for use to determine whether we shall remain unwanted spectators on the storefront or we shall ourselves become the merchants inside.

There is, of course, the sideshow in which the Mayor of Gaborone, Haskins Nkaigwa, claims he knew nothing about the latest round of harassment of the vendors and their eviction from their precarious pavement perches.

For icing on the cake, the illustrious Lord Mayor makes the keen observation that his council has been doing the vendors a favour by letting them trade because the country’s laws do not sanction street vending but hawking.

Without a doubt, we appreciate the anger of the street vendors who want to lobby their relatives and friends to join their ballot boycott.

However, it is our conviction that the way to wreak revenge on the bullies who masquerade as their representatives is to use the vote to jettison them out of power.

 

 

 

Today’s thought

“Understanding is a two-way street.”

 

– Eleanor Rooseveld