At the office he met some os his colleagues and some of his students.
Everything was pretty normal there was not even a sign that anything was amiss or things would go bad at any time .He even went to do some shopping. He bought nothing much, just the usaul grocery.In his shopping bags there was nothing seditious. It is not like he bought yelow cake-an ingredient that makes some weapons of mass destruction.. He just got some groceries for himself and his teenage daughter who is doing her O’levels at Maru a Pula. Yes he got home fine, hoping to fix some dinner with her daughter but he got some unexpected visitors,the kind that the good professor never expected.
what happened next is something that the he never contemplated in democratic Botswana. Even as a professor of political science, he has to admit his limitations in other areas. He is endowed with faculties to unravel complex political situations but nothing to anticipate that bureaucrats in a democratic state would serve him with a deportation order. But that is what he got on Friday when he was branded a prohibited immigrant in Botswana. It is very clear that he was devastated by the order. Talking to the Monitor at the High Court on Saturday, he said he loves this country very much. He points to his fifteen years of solid service to the country as testimony of his undying love.
“In December I signed a contract - a two year extension contract with the University of Botswana,” Good said, adding that he is completely devastated by the deportation order.
He would be sad to leave Botswana and in particular the University of Botswana. He says the university offers the best teaching and researching environment in southern Africa.
Does Good have any idea why the state is throwing him out? He is at a loss and can only hazard a guess, based on what one of the officials who delivered the deportation order said to him. The official told Good he is being deported because of his politics.
“I think it is because of my opinions on the state of democracy in the country. I am not a member of any political party in the country. All I have done is write fearlessly on the state of our democracy and talk to you guys in the media on what I think. I thought I was doing what I ought to do as a researcher and an academic,” Good says. He is aware that his views might have rubbed some people in power the wrong way, but he says he was only doing his duty as a political scientist.
Recently he was quoted in the media saying that founding president, the later Sir Seretse Khama, abused special election of MPs to reward ruling party functionaries. Good did not spare Vice President Ian Khama saying the current cabinet is his own creation. He described Khama as a person who values allegiance over merit. Good’s deportation comes days before he could co-present a paper at a seminar entitled Presidential succession in Botswana: No mode for Africa. In the paper, he argues that Botswana does not quite represent a model of presidential transitions in Africa. This is because the two presidential transitions in 1980 and 1998 both took place without reference to the wishes of the people. He said these transitions were determined by a very few and involved successors who had no popular constituencies.
Talking about Ian Khama the paper says: “The preference accorded to Khama is to a man who has no ministerial job and whose education credentials are seemingly a secret within the country. Furthermore, Ian Khama has made no secret of his intense dislike of the compromises of politics and of his own party as unprincipled, intolerant, selfish vultures and monkeys. This is the person who is about to take over the African miracle”.
Asked who could have engineered his deportation, he said it could be both President Festus Mogae and his Vice-President Khama.
Could be it that he is a spy for one of Botswana’s enemies?
“That is absolute nonsense. I have not done anything subversive. All I do is write and independently speak my mind,” he said.
