It is a honourable thing when people engage in action in our favour. A few good words cannot be eaten, nor can they change the condition of lack or hurt we may be experiencing. Equally so, a few good thoughts may never be known, for whoever there is to attest to knowing any good thoughts thought in our favour must be more than human and must scare us to bits if only because no one wants people to know their very private and inward schemes and contemplations.
But if you engage in action in our favour, if you do things for us, things that improve our image, serve our spiritual and physical needs and enhance our chances in the pursuit for happiness and then you are most honourable indeed. Action speaks louder than words as they say. We don’t take it lightly that Nigel Jones has spoken in what many believe to be in our favour.
By merely pronouncing about us, Lord Nigel has helped open our ears to listen to what is being said about us. And we are reminded of Rene Descartes when he cautioned that we ought to treat very circumspectly whatever is being said in our favour, for very often favour is not unaccompanied as bases for requital.
Being the liberal that he is, we may have nothing to fear from Nigel’s possible other motives. But we only wish he was more to the left of centre in a world of political debate system where Africa, the Third World, human rights, poverty alleviation, militarism, climate control and the human factor and so on are at centre stage.
We salute you Nigel.But we also wish you had not overlooked the fact that it is not the skills of retired and “waiting for death” older and difficult to maintain British citizens we need in a Botswana about to lose 25 precent of its population in 15 years time.
Presently, we need skills that would stop or greatly reduce the amount of loss of lives we are faced with within the next 15 years as you so authoritatively pointed out. In fact, Botswana being a Third World economy, we need that age-old buzzword, “appropriate technology” that has hitherto been pumped into our minds and hearts by the same old and retiring British citizens coming here as expatriate expert personnel.
We therefore believe as we have been persuasively taught, that any other retired philanthropists may not readily have the “appropriate technology” content because they would be coming from systems that will be, on a hitherto common understanding, way above us technologically so that whatever skills they would bring here would be far ahead of our currency. Unless you have an idea of what skills exactly we may require and would be washed-out in the next 15 years?
Also, when should we be expecting these pensioner-missionaries and how can we be sure they will not be coming to compete with our mushrooming educated unemployed? We have our own graduate youths doing the street life because they cannot be absorbed into the job market. How are the future of these, our children to be secured when in comes 65 years of experience against “just finished my degree”
We believe right now we need the vaccine of all vaccines to banish HIV/AIDS, poverty, war and strife, sexism, racism, and all human vice and avarice from Planet Earth, our human minds and habits, but from the whole universe in its vastness. And we are sure Lord Jones is better placed to advocate for all that from the left of centre of his liberal position.
Otherwise, as our ears were opened to heed Nigel’s good words about us, we also got interested in who was going to be responsible for the good old retirees volunteering to take up posts in Botswana. You see, we are a very poor nation becoming poorer by the day if only because of the scourge that drains us daily with ARVs and the like.
If the British pensioners come with all expenses paid and they are here only to use up whatever is left of their active time in this life and that when they die they would be shipped back home in order not to make any demand on our land by way of a grave site, then why, let all God’s people say Amen. For aren’t we exampled from the peopling of the Americas and Australasia, Africa, Hong Kong, that sooner or later, the benevolent missions led by a community of pious people and sponsored by benevolent Lords become but territorial conquests?
