Almost all the stalls had given a day off to their workers and those who went to the mall to get their coffee fix at the Diamond Square were left both disappointed and amazed. Obviously such huge events must have a fair dose of controversy for them to get the right level of publicity though this is not the official position. The PR teams usually have their hands full trying to close all the avenues of controversy but the Controversy Factories keep replacing their blades with even sharper blades every year. This year’s controversy was provided by the inclusion of one artist from Nigeria called Davido. He managed to push up the Anger Metre into the red zone for a great number of locals who felt that there’s enough local talent that should have won the contract to serenade people during the summit. These are the very same people that also feel other countries are not receptive to Botswana talent. But truth is things don’t usually work that way. Any local event must be headlined by an artist who is not local. That seems the showbiz template in Africa. Imagine going to a show and you find your cousin headlining a show - the very cousin who needed a ride to get to the show in the first place.
This year’s theme went something like: The Entrepreneurial Spirit. For the longest time government has been trying to push down this spirit down many a citizen’s throat. This has proved tougher than arguing with a woman – which is the toughest task known to males. The hope is that the theme is the proverbial boot that will open the door to enterprise. Apparently most of our people are stuck in the phase of tenderpreneurship. Tenderpreneurship is a millennial word that has just waded into dictionaries and Thesauruses in recent times but to cut a long story (or word) short, it is where people use political connections to secure government contracts and proceed to botch them up. This is hardly sustainable because those that don’t win take government to courts and judges are known to chastise government in normal countries. Tenderpreneurship, like all viruses, keeps mutating and now there’s a fresher type called corrupreneurs. This one has not made it into any dictionary and the virus has the experts at sixes and sevens. The Ink Spills Dictionary of Millennial English defines this as pseudo tenderpreneurs who win contracts by bribing anything that moves.
The conversations were supposedly kicked off by the first citizen. The snide remarks brigade obviously saw a problem with that but truth is the first citizen is a youth at heart and has dance moves that could shame the South African Minister of Electricity. So finding him in the midst of a youth event should not worry anybody. When the first citizen is official at a generally gay (not the same sex type) event, the whole country is treated to his latest dance moves. So, yes, now that the Forbes extravaganza has left our shores, we will remember the indelible memories of young African business people with style and panache, a transformed and pimped Main Mall without its usual residents and a president dancing.
(For comments, feedback and insults email [email protected]) Thulaganyo Jankey is a training consultant who runs his own training consultancy that provides training in BQA- accredited courses. His other services include registering consultancies with BQA and developing training courses.
Contact him on 74447920 or email [email protected].
