As I se it

MICHAEL DINGAKE | Tuesday May 14, 2013 00:00

I could have gone back to live in South Africa in 1994 when the country killed its crazy apartheid policy and legislated for freedom and democracy.  I went to do Standard V in South Africa at a young age of 13,  continued my education in a foreign country, identified with the liberation movement, fell in love and married a South African; I boasted more South African acquaintances and friends than I had in the Bechuanaland Protectorate.

Despite the sweet memories I carried from there, I didn't love South Africa more than Botswana. Botswana was my first love; Bobonong the stony hamlet where I was born always counted high in my thoughts even while I 'fought foreign wars' as one of my BDP friends portrayed me during a motion of no confidence debate I piloted in Parliament, a few months after becoming an opposition MP!

'This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,/ This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, /This other Eden, demi-Paradise. This happy breed of men, this little world, / This precious stone set in the sea. / This blessed plot, this England, / This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings...'

Royal, majesty, seat, Eden, happy, precious, blessed, nurse and womb, words that define the England, Shakespeare and the English were proud of.  It makes me wish Batswana could borrow the words to describe our own living Botswana. The above emotive stanzas on England, were triggered in my mind while I read an article, in one of our newspapers, which reported that the Assistant Minister in the Office of the President, Honourable Gloria Somolekae would be out to some village, some time soon to excite and bluff villagers with the 2016 Vision theme of making our Botswana, 'A United and Proud Nation..!' I thought, ah! but the 2016 Vision has been killed by the same men who colluded with the foreigners who killed the Botswana Meat Commission (BMC); could they be capable of resurrecting anything they have killed? We, human beings are fantastic; we have created and continue to create many objects in both the material, mental and spiritual form and never give up resuscitating the corpses we killed and buried in the past. 

We are creators par excellence.  Had God not created us, we would have created, God in our own image!It is incomprehensible what additional evidence Messrs Clive Marshall and Van Vuuren were expected to bring before the committee which they had initially omitted at their first appearance, except to add more condescending retorts to the image of their Batswana colleagues, at the meat industry?  Why do I have a sneaking hunch that they were called back at their own insistence to refute the sinister acts they are alleged to have committed at the BMC and to hit back at Batswana witnesses who gave evidence exposing their part in the meat industry demise? Are former Batswana BMC managers implicitly accused of being incapable of running the BMC because of their race, likely to be called back also, to defend themselves against the insinuations that not only are they incapable of running the BMC, but are unreliable as witnesses?

If the twosome feel they were in any way maligned by witnesses who gave evidence of their racism why were they not advised to take their complaints to the relevant institutions that handle similar grievances, why use the committee for dialogue? Diplomatic to a fault, our undying culture! In the unfolding BMC saga we appear headed for failure to ever become a proud nation, if we continue to be led by the current political leadership, which kowtows, to every demand that denigrates Batswana leadership. For decades now, the opposition in Botswana demanded and advocated for the policy of localisation to empower and develop indigenous potential to control national affairs, but the co-conspirators among us not only frustrated the idea, but also in practice resisted adoption of the policy even as they adopted it in theory. So we run around in circles muttering platitudes we do not sincerely mean, to placate critical observers and lull Batswana to perpetual slumber. Try all our linguistic gymnastics as we may, to win physical games, proud and united, we are far from being!

Obviously we shall not become a proud nation before we become a united nation. The symptoms of our disunity go back to the pre-colonial period when some ethnic groups either by conquest or dominant culture became lords of the manor in the country and specific groups became hewers of wood, drawers of water and herders of cattle.We may have a democratic constitution oozing freedom and equality now; the truth on the ground is that Batswana are an unequal society you will ever find anywhere in the world practicing a caste system outside India. The rulers will not admit it, however political institutions, exist, not outside the Constitution but right inside it, which give a lie to the equality of ethnic groups - Ntlo ya Dikgosi (previously the House of Chiefs) is a house divided against itself where some dikgosi are hereditary and others are elected every five years;  land ownership is still based on antiquated system of paramount tribes: Ngwato Land Board, Kweneng Land Board, Ngwaketsi Land Board, etc .There is no Kgalagadi Land Board, Kalanga Land Board or Birwa Land Board etc.  The existence of an organisation like Reteng (We exist!) is full testimony that some unrecognised ethnic groups like the worm will turn!Like apartheid in South Africa the caste system in Botswana, discriminates against a combined majority of so-called 'minor' tribes! Discrimination deprives any nation in which it occurs the potential talent and pride of all those who are discriminated against.

Remember, 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.'  We have been divided for far too long, no 'proud and united nation' rhetoric, will make us so; we must identify the source of our division and humiliation and put it right decisively.