Two South African newspapers have this week focused on the Appeal Court’s decision to uphold the President’s eviction of Kenneth Good.
Nicole Fritz, writing in Business Day and Bob Amato in The Sunday Independent, both view the deportation order in terms of the effects of increased terrorism in undermining human rights.
In a sense, we are all suspects in that all of us have to be searched when we enter certain buildings, or whatever. We are expected to have driving licences and IDs with us much of the time.
Initially, Good was ordered to be deported on the grounds that he was undesirable. After he appealed, the President now declared in a new affidavit that Good’s deportation was in the interest of the peace, stability and national security of Botswana.
What, if anything, might have been whispered to Ambassadors of the leading Western democracies who might have sought more information on what they might assume was Good’s secret underground terrorism?
Good was permitted no hearing to make representations as to why he should not be deported on the grounds that he was undesirable, or that what he was up to threatened Botswana’s peace, stability and national security.
Fritz claims that the denial of a hearing was in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Botswana is a party. If true, then the Court has authorised a violation of the Covenant. It did so, apparently, on the grounds that the President made a judgement in terms of the applicable law, that he is entitled to make, and on the further assumption that it is justified by whatever appropriate facts he took into account.
Fritz points out that in the new South Africa, there is a Promotion of Access to Information Act, in terms of which security-sensitive information can be made available to courts for examination, even while others may be refused access to such information. She argues that Botswana’s President’s powers are like those Apartheid rulers had, and exercised.
Amato, in The Sunday Independent, claims that in South Africa, no lecturer, even a foreigner, could summarily be banished by presidential decree. The lecturers’ constitutional rights to be given reasons for the expulsion and to be heard would oblige the Home Affairs Minister to conduct a hearing and give reasons that arose from such a hearing.
Amato takes a snide sideswipe in saying that we also don‚t confuse academia and the state by having our President head up a university!
Fritz argues in conclusion that Botswana is manufacturing a threat to security to justify getting rid of Good for criticising BDP rule. The only blow suffered by Botswana’s democracy has been struck not by terrorists but by the President, and more disturbingly by the Court of Appeal.
In opening his column, Amato argues that the harm terrorists do to their victims, might in the present epoch, come to be exceeded in gravity by the harm they do to freedom of thought and due process of law in the democracies they attack.
Amato writes that the gist of the judgement by Judge of Appeal, Tebbut, backed by four others, was that the Courts must not interfere with the powers of the much better informed executive in deciding whether someone was a threat to the national interest.
I have to confess to be appalled by the decision, as I was appalled some twenty years ago when the BDP introduced its draconian National Security Act and I went head-in-head in confrontation with the Head of the army at the time.
Amato writes that the Parliament of Botswana may perhaps be influenced by the bad publicity the story has brought the country, and by the specific advice of a dissenting judgement by Lord Caulsfield, to change the bad parts of the law to those that make the President a judge in his own case.
He notes that Judge Caulsfield, a Scottish Law Lord, wrote suggestions as to how Parliament should change the clause on which Judge Tebbut based his decision: The clause reads: a person subject to deportation as an undesirable inhabitant may be denied the opportunity to know why he has been deported, even where the disclosure of the reasons could do no harm to the public interest.
If Botswana has contravened the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, then something should be done about it, soon.
I’m not sure that anything will, though, because we now have a regime that is unconcerned about world opinion even though its ruling party keeps crying that it can‚t get Foreign Direct Investment.
There is another. The Opposition should be preparing not only for policies that will create jobs and promote economic as well as material development, but must also look at failures to respect human rights of all its citizens and the many expatriates who contribute to the nation‚s development. But will they?
