Only God can judge us
Ian Khama | Tuesday April 8, 2014 10:16
From the very start let me once again express how humble you have made me feel by bestowing on me the honour and priviledge to be your Party Leader once again. This comes with so much responsibility and challenges, through good times and bad times. I often ask myself when I go to bed at night, what surprises, what unlikely events will the next day have in store for me. One also has to put up with the negativity that the opposition dwell on, the negativity some in the media prey on you for, and once in a while someone will even write a book also dwelling on and immersing themselves in the same negativity. But I wake up in the morning refreshed and driven and motivated by my desire to serve this nation and its people. Something I have always done and will continue to do. We have a great country and a great people, led by a great party, no matter what people or papers or books say. We should be proud of ourselves, recognising that as people no one of us is perfect. So let us help each other when in need, pick one another up when we fall, congratulate others when they do well and avoid being involved in pulling down those around you as if your judging of others dissolves your own mistakes and extinguishes your various past failings in multiple relationships that you conveniently declined to mention. No matter what your personal ambition failed to deliver for you, don’t take it out on others.
I state once again, as I have said before that everything you say or do should be said and done in the best interests of this country. Anything else does not add value or contribute to national building. Go about your life trying to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.
This National Council comes at the end of the current five year cycle from one election to the next. The year 2014 therefore brings much anticipation and expectation.
Let me at this moment comment on our primary elections. Once again, the exercise was to be quite honest shrouded in controversies. The IEC, believe me, did try hard to deliver a smooth election by amongst others, investing in a lot of IT equipment never seen before, engaging many people, around eighty, who worked day and night in a special off limit, secure facility, to produce voter rolls and membership cards. Despite all this there were still challenges as you all know that sparked off a number of appeals. We will use this Council to discuss some of these aspects so that we can all better appreciate what the issues were that confront us on such occasions and how we can overcome them. However at the end of the day the initial results and the appeals process delivered a conclusion. Therefore the time has now come to move forward. I therefore appeal to those who were not successful to accept the outcome as anyone should in any competition. We cannot all emerge victorious. As far as I am concerned, those who were not successful are not losers.
There are no winners or losers for the purpose of the primaries. It is only the party that is a winner because we have candidates who will represent us at an election we must win again, and it must be the opposition who are the losers. Those who were not successful are not losers because they are not out of the race. Because the race will be run again and again and it could happen that those who succeeded this time may not succeed next time and vice versa.
So standing up and demonstrating your party patriotism, and continued involvement in active party affairs will earn you recognition by me and the leadership as much as those who were successful. This I assure you of.
Withdrawing from participation will be regrettable and unfortunate and would tend to demonstrate your involvement with this party is only for personal interest. Many of you who were not successful have accepted the outcome despite the issues and challenges I referred to. To them I thank them for being true democrats. To those who have not yet come to terms with themselves for not being successful, I extend my understanding to you and the others for the nature of your situation and predicament and hope sooner rather than later you will come around to accepting the outcome as difficult as it may be, to enable you to be fully with your BDP family once again and mobilise those who voted and supported you to now support our candidates.
As we move forward in the short term, I wish to urge structures and the candidates to become fully involved in the voter registration exercise. The numbers who have registered so far are not enough. In the final registration period by the IEC you need to really go out and encourage all eligible to do so to register.
Secondly, you need to carefully and I emphasise this, carefully go through the voters rolls when they are presented for inspection.
The opposition have in the past, and will attempt to do so again, try to traffic voters to their preferred constituencies. Check that every name on the roll is indeed a legitimate constituent in that polling area.
We can hold our heads high when selling this great Party to the voters for our achievements in the last five years. The recession that hit us hard, as it did many other countries left its toll on our development plans for the period. But our resilience, our ability to manage the recovery, and the interventions we put in place saw us emerge from the crisis intact having cushioned the worst of the situation from too negatively affecting our citizens, unlike in other countries more developed than us who still find themselves in this crisis to this day. We were able to shield and even improve the living standards of the more disadvantaged in our society.
This can only happen with a government which has ability and experience in governance. All these other parties - the opposition, who clamour to be in government have nothing at all to offer other than criticism. People cannot live, eat, be housed, be employed and survive on words of criticism and lies. Like any country we have challenges, for example right now but only temporarily, and I emphasise temporarily, is the situation with the power supply. Government does not construct power stations, private contractors do. If they do a bad job, that is when Government steps in to intervene. That is what we have done and will put right through such interventions. Government does not produce rain, so when there is a drought there will be water shortages. But Government must intervene to put in place remedial measures to lessen the impact of future minimal water situations. We are doing that.
Education is another area where government needs to intervene to improve the entire sector, from infrastructure, literature availability, equipment functioning, meals, teacher motivation, student willingness to learn and full parent participation. We are as we speak doing just that hand in hand with foreign experts. A strategy for implementation will be finalised in the coming months to give us a road map moving forward for the future.
We have done a lot in the past five years and even in the years before that. Credit must go equally to those who came before us for what we have accomplished. Only the blind and the deaf choose not to see and hear about our achievements. I am not referring to those who suffer those disabilities. I refer only to those in the opposition whose blindness and deafness is deliberate and self-inflicted.
They refuse for the purpose of political opportunism to recognise our achievements as a nation even when our rankings on the continent come in as number one on many issues, and where we score high internationally.
Why cant they admit the truth. But no, they only pray for failure, and take delight when one or two things go wrong, and abandon their patriotism and nationhood to try to make political capital of challenges the nation may face from time to time with reckless regard for the plight of the very people they want to govern.
So their vision is to see the country and its people collapse so as to help them win an election. This is shameful. The opposition are like certain birds that feed on others misfortunes.
Opposition Parties having spent the last five years only doing this, condemning and criticizing and hoping for failure to survive, now all of a sudden are faced with the prospects of having to compete once again in an election against a very successful party and what it has achieved. So now they will have to add to their talent in negativity to come up with what they can offer. So we must brace ourselves for their promises to the people of Botswana of milk and honey in areas where there are no cows and bees, to fish in dried up rivers, to extend the Okavango into the Kalahari, to give everyone in the next five years a house, job, car, double digit salary increase and a cure for baldness. What I am saying in other words is that they will be promising to do things that even they know they cannot deliver in an attempt to trick voters to their side.
In my acceptance speech I outlined some of the many programmes that have been put in place for Batswana to benefit from. Going forward I want to assure you that our focus of attention will continue to be the eradication of poverty, youth empowerment, agriculture development in which the aim is to be self sufficient in various produce and stop our dependence on imports and the ever rising cost of imported food, the provision of affordable housing, expanding good quality health care. I have already spoken about our plans for the education sector, employment opportunities, reliable and stable power, and access to water and many others.
All these and others are work in progress, that even despite the recent recession we have been able to move forward. These, unlike our opponents are not empty promises because these are happening now and will gain momentum.
As the economy improves, so will our ability to further improve the lives of our citizens. Included in them is our desire to also improve the conditions of service of public officers. The recession put a hold on the need to do this, and some unions with questionable agendas tried to seize the opportunity spurred on by the opposition to take advantage of giving public officers the impression we were unwilling to do so. This is highly irresponsible when they deliberately seek to mislead public officers into thinking that the country is well off, when in fact we had a crisis in the economy. Yet they knew we had to borrow significantly from outside to sustain ourselves, and now we have to pay back what we borrowed. I am only glad that unlike in other countries, our intention to keep public officers employed, and not lose their jobs was successful despite the severe challenges we had. So we are going forward from now with the intention to cover lost ground for them.
The State of the Nation Address I gave a few months ago, coupled with the recent Budget Speech is a strong indicator of what we have achieved. Do use them alongside the manifesto. I am confident in the future, I feel motivated by our achievements to do more, and more so by the positive response from citizens to our programmes across the length and breadth of this country.
I invite you all and those not here to embrace our optimism and commitment to serve our fellow citizens and go into the elections knowing that there is still no alternative to the BDP and our commitment of putting people first.
Let us remember to pray and thank God for the rains we asked for. Only God can judge us, and in being judged by Him let us live the life He expects of us, and then judge yourself on God’s expectations.