|
Remember the silent blind man stretching out his hand? I presented him as my mental embodiment of poverty. I see him in my dreams and nightmares. I unveiled him like an emblem; a badge of infamy that shames the battered fortress of our national conscience and consciousness. He is the shape of our inhumanity and injustice. I simply bore testimony to his abject misery; recounted his pain and waited for the Minister of Finance to present answers to the crisis. I then had to listen to this Minister lend an air of inevitability to poverty, invest it with a semblance of permanence and imbue a spurious appearance of respectability to what is, in reality, a massive violation of human rights of, by his own figures, 30% of the population of this country.
Over the last few months, I have spoken forcefully, fearlessly and unapologetically about the many injustices that bedevil this nation. A few sycophants have raved and sniped at me for this. The most vocal of them accused me of insulting the President and his Ministers. One of the sycophants, who was at the time, struggling to snuggle close to the President, even wrote me an open letter. I welcomed his challenge and even as I sent bolts of analytical lightning at his absurdities, defended his right to speak out as he pleased. The fellow managed to earn his reward. His mournful cries touched the President, pulled at his heartstrings and some crumbs were dropped for the young man to stuff himself. Rabidly ambitious character that he is, he has begun another campaign, this time, it seems, he eyes a cabinet appointment. Nothing wrong with it, expect that his rhapsodies of yearning seem to blind him to elementary truths.
Please remind the young man that the government of Botswana and the Botswana Democratic Party are, conceptually, not one and the same entity. Can somebody tell the boy that the government administers national assets for and on behalf of people of all political orientations and hue. The rules and expectations that apply are therefore different from any that apply in respect either of his salary and allowances as a Member of Parliament or indeed the slush funds that his party receives from its mysterious, faceless and spineless donors. Tell him please, that Government, unlike the Botswana Democratic Party, is constitutionally bound to observe and uphold democratic values. Remind him for me, will you, that his attacks against the private press may impress the petty tyrants in his own party, and win him a place in the awkward squad of cabinet appointees, but that to all sane people, his remarks expose him as a decrepit monument of all that is undemocratic about this country’s political set up. Need I tell him that in his quest to belong, he is rapidly killing his soul to serve his body. Politics can be a perilous sojourn.
The repressive machinations of this government have now reached white heat. This is what I said to myself as I pored over the document and pondered. Deportation Order! It declared a 71-year-old, frail and harmless looking academic a prohibited immigrant. Prohibited? Yes, undesirable, unwelcome and unwanted! I lifted my eyes and examined the academic. Was I missing something? Was I looking at a walking missile or time-bomb? Would it blow up any time and engulf this country in some conflagration? I wandered back in time, wondering what kind of country feels threatened by a single academic whose only weapons are his conscience and ideas? One last question for the President and his Vice, what should we expect next; disappearances, fake accidents that claim lives of the vocal dissenters? I feel a convulsive twinge of my own conscience!
|
