Book Review: Nasha justifies Khama leadership style
Correspondent | Friday April 4, 2014 11:48
Leading critics of President Khama also had a field day claiming that Nasha’s ‘revelation’ supported their longstanding condemnation of Khama’s way of doing things.
However, my reading of Nasha’s title is that she is not casting aspersion on Khama’s leadership style. If anything, she seems to be justifying Khama’s form of leadership. She puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of members of the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) which she says gave Khama a constitutional platform to operate from, and then they cry foul in secret.
‘That is the President Khama that Democrats created, and then cry foul about his actions’ (p.113). A small point of departure seems to be when Nasha talks about freedom of speech during Sir Seretse Khama’s presidency (1966-1980). ‘Mind you, those were the days when authority was genuinely respected, and not feared!’ (p.86). Unfortunately, this declaration or ‘promise’ is not honoured by way of an explanation.
Nasha’s easy to read title details her birth, schooling, work as a civil servant at the Department of Broadcasting where she attained the position of Director after which she was appointed Botswana’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.
After declining a request for a second term as High Commissioner she returned home to work as Deputy Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She ultimately achieved her political ambition when she was appointed Specially Elected Member of Parliament following the 1994 general election. She also became a cabinet minister holding different portfolios until after the 2009 general election when she was elected Speaker of Parliament.
She says that after living with her elder sister in Johannesburg she returned to Botswana in the early 1950s to start primary schooling in the village of Mmathethe in her Bangwaketse tribal area. She could not go to school in South Africa because of the inferior Bantu Education introduced by the apartheid regime for the blacks.
Traditional attitudes towards girls and women in the patriarchal society almost made it impossible for her to go to school but her mother’s determination ensured that the young Nasha went much further with her education.
Working as a journalist for Radio Botswana was something of a calling for Nasha and she enjoyed her work very much which alongside her colleagues they performed productively, we are told. She says ‘We were all an exceptionally good team at Radio Botswana....
That was long before concepts such as “productivity” and “team building” were imported from Singapore and which, I dare say, have instead given birth to disunity, hatred, (metsametsano in Setswana), disloyalty and lack of commitment in today’s civil service” (p.26).
She goes on to say that‘We would broadcast both as government media whilst at the same time playing the role of public watchdog where necessary’ (p.26).
It may have been helpful for Nasha to give a few examples in this regard particularly given today’s environment where the state media is often accused of being used by government as its propaganda apparatus.
As an insider and activist in the ruling BDP she shares with us her involvement in how the longstanding traditional rival factions functioned in the party. This involved a great deal of dishonesty, back-stabbing, and opportunistic shifting of faction membership which only served to undermine party unity.
Nasha also writes about the recruitment of Ian Khama from the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) in 1998 to help end factional strife in the BDP but factionalism still continues in the party. This development was spearheaded by President Festus Mogae who appointed Khama his vice president much to the disappointment and annoyance of some BDP Members of Parliament among whom was Nasha herself who haboured ambition of becoming Vice President (p.106-107).
In the book Nasha goes to great lengths to explain her involvement in the movement for women empowerment in Botswana, particularly in the area of political leadership across party lines.
However, she says that her experience is that the struggle for women empowerment is more often than not undermined by women themselves in support of men against other women. ‘Some of the most virulent opponents of this new development were women themselves’ (p.154).
She laments that despite great efforts to empower women politicians through intensive workshops and other fora, ‘During the 9th Parliament, which ran from 2004 to 2009, we had seven MPs. We worked hard, with the hope of increasing the number to double digits at the next elections scheduled for 2009, but instead of increasing, the number of elected female MPs dropped to a lousy two’ (p.155).
As Speaker of Parliament since 2009 Nasha credits herself with having done a great deal by way of introducing Information Technology (IT) and training of MPs.
The result of this has been that ‘MPs are on top of situations and can no longer be easily fooled into letting issues pass [without] subjecting them to rigorous questioning and debate’ (p.182).
In 2012 former Speaker of Parliament and Nasha’s predecessor, Ray Mololo published a voluminous and scathing critique of Botswana Parliament entitled Democratic Deficit in the Parliament of Botswana.
In this title Molomo dismisses Parliament as a ‘rubber stamp’ and ‘doormat’ of the country’s Executive.
He also says that efforts to reverse this trend by empowering Parliament and helping make it independent were ruthlessly thwarted by the Executive as people protected personal interests.
However, Nasha tells us that she has worked tirelessly to overhaul Parliament’s Standing Orders in order to empower it and make it truly independent of the Executive.
She says she was able to achieve this because Cabinet Ministers, who constitute the Executive, did not attend workshops where the Standing Orders were revised claiming to have been sent on errands by President Khama. By the time they realised what was going on it was too late for them!
At any rate, any Botswana political leader who publishes her/his memoirs will invariably have the publication compared to Nasha’s former cabinet colleague, David Magang’s Magic of Perseverance (2008) which pitched the bar quite high. In this regard Nasha falls far too short.
For instance, she does not provide critical historical background and context to some of the issues she raises in her book, something which Magang does very well. Nasha also does not engage with Molomo’s book on Parliament.
She tells us that she was born on August 6, 1947 but she is sceptical about the date because ‘in those days there was no registration of births, let alone deaths’ (p.1). This is in spite of the fact that history indicates that the progressive Kgosi Seepapitso II of the Bangwaketse (1910-1916) introduced recording of minutes at his kgotla meetings and other activities such as registration of births and deaths in his tribal area.
This tradition was also encouraged by the colonial authorities, particularly starting in the mid-1930s as part of reforming tribal administration among the Batswana. As a History major Nasha should have engaged this historical theme.
She also accuses the British colonial government in Botswana of having had ‘no clue of the size of the population in the country’ (p.1).
This is not correct because since 1904 population censuses were conducted regularly by the colonial authorities. For instance, in 1946 (a year before Nasha was born) a comprehensive national census was conducted which impressed the legendary Anthropologist Isaac Schapera so much that he wrote a monograph entitled Ethnic Composition of Tswana Tribes (1952) which analyses the census.
Nasha further carelessly writes that ‘In those imperialist days, a country became a “settler” colony if there was something to be exploited from it. There was nothing here, and I mean absolutely nothing’ (p.2).
This is a claim that was made in the 1970s and 1980s by historians who subscribe to the ‘Underdevelopment’ theory but it has since been debunked quite strongly by Philip Steenkamp Jr in his PhD thesis and a subsequent journal article (1991).
Nasha should have updated her historical knowledge here.
In discussing issues of women empowerment it could have been helpful for Nasha to provide a ‘score card’ for each of the Botswana four Presidents –Sir Seretse Khama (1966-1980), Sir Ketumile Masire (1980-1998), Festus Mogae (1998-2008), and Ian Khama (2008). She argues that a lot of progress was made during Seretse’s era but it has since declined.
As a national leader, who was involved in government policy formulation and implementation, she should have gone beyond those issues that she personally pursued in order to give us her views on other longstanding serious national issues.
These include the ‘Basarwa question’, labour and trade unions, citizen economic empowerment, socio-economic impact of the ‘Fire’ church, education, diamond beneficiation, freedom of information, youth unemployment, and electricity crisis among many others.
In chapter four Nasha discusses her troubled marriage and manages to get the sympathy of the reader.
However, she spoils this in chapter five as she gets too carried away in her further elaboration of her husband’s alleged cheating escapades which include Nasha resorting to unsavoury behaviour in confronting the husband’s alleged mistress. This chapter was not necessary since here Nasha just washes her dirty marital linen in public.
Her title seems to be merely an elaborate campaign document meant to secure herself a second term as Speaker of Parliament after the 2014 general election.
Therefore, the book does not contribute much to the political history of Botswana. The danger is that a trend could be set whereby general elections are preceded by flooding of the market with rushed and half-baked ‘memoirs’ of politicians hoping to further their careers.
Book: Madam Speaker, Sir! Breaking the Glass Ceiling: One Woman’s Struggles.
Athour: Margaret N Nasha,
Gaborone: Diamond Educational Publishers, 2014, x+208 pages, soft cover, ISBN: 978-99912-933-5-6
Reviewed by: JOHN MAKGALA