Botswana fast becoming a police state before our eyes
Michael Dingake | Tuesday February 18, 2014 14:02
Do we see this development in Botswana since the creation of the Directorate of Intelligence and Security Services with Isaac Kgosi in charge? Heinrich Himmler the chicken farmer was SS head; Dr Josef Goebbels whose philosophy, was a lie repeated many times becomes the truth, headed the propaganda outfit! Who do we have here? Masisi the bootlicker? Himmler’s storm troopers’ strategy was intimidate, terrorise and beat Germans into submission! The DIS does no less.
Hitler's Germany was a police state controlled by the SS; the economy fell under state control; Krupp the car manufacturer was ordered to design and produce an affordable car for the German workers, the Volkswagen (people’s car). Jewish businesses were expropriated and handed over to the pure Germans. Indigenisation. It was a master-stroke to reconcile antagonistic capitalist and working class interests in the Third Reich. Deutschland ubber alles (Germany above everything else became the Reich’s slogan. The Third Reich terrorism spilled over the borders and plunged the world into World War II, which took millions of innocent lives and devastated the global economy.
The South African apartheid state (1948 - 1994)led by admirers of Adolf Hitler was a police state. Opponents of the apartheid state were silenced, organisations proscribed and newspapers taken out of circulation. Anti-apartheid black leaders were harassed and exiled, apartheid critics were kept under constant police surveillance, private mail was intercepted, telephone lines bugged, homes of political leaders raided. BJ Vorster an unapologetic Nazi sympathiser could boastfully say after the outlawing of the PAC and the ANC “I have given the police full powers to deal with the saboteurs...” BJ Vorster then Minister of (In)Justice was admitting South Africa was a police state! ‘Full powers’ to the police by fascist Vorster, later to become Prime Minister did not mean the apartheid state had been anything other than a police state before! No, the apartheid state as far as blacks were concerned had always been an undeclared police state. Torture previously denied became official police interrogation method. I should know.
Under Lieutenant General Ian Khama’s regime, police torture of detainees though denied is common. The regime sanctions torture and knows it! Numerous torture cases have been reported but remain uninvestigated. Basarwa are routinely tortured for alleged poaching, detained criminal suspects often appear in court complaining of torture by the police. In the recent past, police have been reported to have shot, injured or killed people they suspected of having committed crime. None of these allegations have ever been investigated by the justice system. Recently there were reports of torture of Dukwi refugees by the DIS. As expected, the Ministry of Defence, Justice and Security vehemently denied the newspaper report without investigation: “The Ministry takes great exception to such misinformation arising from the publication of untruths and unfounded allegations about security organs and its officials,” rang the statement!
Responding to police statements about the recent shooting of Costa Kalafatis, the brother of John who was executed the Wild West style in 2009, whose assassins were reluctantly brought to trial and were given presidential pardon shortly after they were given lenient sentences not commensurate with their heinous crime, the former Botswana police commissioner, Norman Moleboge said the shooting of Costa Kalafatis was riddled with mistakes: “I have tried to analyse their statements or reports but they throw me deeper into confusion and leave me with more questions than answers; I think the nation deserves better than what they are fed with, the commissioner should step in and clear the mess before it escalates any further. The police service that I have served and left would never shoot for a snatched handbag; they will never shoot first , they will never shoot before they are in danger and such is the standard practice as well.....”
The implication and crux of the former police commissioner’s statement is that the policy and conduct of the Botswana Police Service has changed since he retired from the Police Service. The statement corroborates the general Batswana perception about the transformation for the worse of the police service, now militarised, armed with guns, implicitly licensed to maim, kill innocent and marked citizens; police have become the untouchables of the Republic; that is why the MDJS can harangue anybody who dares allege police torture. By occasionally leasing police duties to the army as happens since the advent of the Khama regime, Batswana are systematically conditioned to accept what prevails in police states, where their counterparts do what they like and no questions are asked.
Batswana will ignore this creeping police state at their own peril! The world that went to war to fight Hitler's Nazism, the world that joined forces against the apartheid South Africa through trade sanctions, material and moral support to the South African liberation movement appears to crumble when it comes to the creeping menace of the Khama police state. Khama is touted as leading the misnamed ‘shining example of democracy,' 'corruption-free' Botswana, unaware Botswana is fast degenerating into the most corrupt and authoritarian state in the continent; the misconception is brought about by Khama's impulsive and unflinching criticism against fellow African states who perpetrate naked atrocities on their own people. The rooftop condemnation of fellow African statesmen endears Khama to western powers and blinds them to outrageous, corrupt and subtle undemocratic acts Khama commits against his own people!