Nonconformist Dow in the race for Mochudi West

Lerato Maleke | Friday June 13, 2014 15:54

 

She shocked many when she announced that she was going to contest for parliamentary office under the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) ticket a couple of years ago.  Though she was not always politically active, Dow says that she was a BDP member all along and first joined the party in the early 1990s.

“This is the first time that I am contested for an elective office,” she says. She won the Mochudi West BDP parliamentary primary elections in 2013.  She is now faced with the daunting task of wrestling the constituency from Gilbert Mangole of the Botswana Movement of Democracy (BMD). 

While contesting under the banner of the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) Mangole and Alfred Ramono Pilane of the Botswana Congress Party (BCP) will be racing against Dow for the Mochudi West parliamentary seat. 

She says standing for elective office is demanding in three ways, as it requires time, money and emotion.

“No one can prepare you for it,” she says adding, “you need to do it to know what I mean.” 

“But I must say that knowing what I know about the whole process, I do not regret one minute of it.  There is no better way to know one’s country, people and their issues,” she says.

One JRR Tolkien who once said, “not all those who wander are lost”, inspires Dow, a married mother of three.

Dow says she meets all sorts of people in various situations and grows to appreciate people’s triumphs and problems.  Dow explains how she also hears first hand people’s proposals for solving their problems and that one comes home hungry and tired, full of ideas, plans and hopes.   “I used to run educational workshops in communities around the country and standing for office allows me to re-live that life,” she says.  “In short, I am enjoying the challenge, but I am very much aware that the hopes and dreams of Batswana will be in the hands of the successful politicians,” she says, adding that it is a burden that can only bring humility.

Dow says the BDP manifesto outlines the party’s road map. A few of the many issues that are detailed therein, which have special relevance to Mochudi West are; rural development, agricultural development, health and rationalisation of land use.

Moreover, she says Mochudi West constituency is faced with a number of challenges including, youth unemployment and dependence on Gaborone for services.

She says the constituency’s proximity to the capital is both a blessing and a curse.  It is a blessing,she says, because proximity to a city always means access to services that are not available in rural communities. It is also a curse because it tends to encourage dependence at the expense of development.

Her current development plans include a new hospital, the Tshele fuel storage project, a mall in Pilane, a wildlife park, and and alternative-fuel project, to name but a few.

Dow emphasises that she will go a long way towards addressing the unemployment problem.

The human rights activist says she is not in a position to promise the impossible.  She says the BDP road map is essentially a strengthening of the fiscal and development policies that took the party from a least-developed to a middle-income country.

“What needs to happen, what is happening, is that the policies, laws, programmes and structures that have brought us here be reviewed, re-evaluated and re-shaped to make them responsive to current problems and demands,” she offers. “For example, a clinic that was adequate for the needs of a community 10 years ago, can it be expected to be adequate today?” asks Dow.  She argues that population size, citizen expectations, and the changing nature of health issues require that such a service be re-structured to meet new demands.

Another example she gives is that of access to land. “We have had a wonderful system of land allocations, but current information would suggest that land boards, as currently structured are not coping; that is demand for land far outweighs the speed at which allocations are made,” she says.

This calls for a restructuring of the allocation system.  She says: “This is not about re-inventing the wheel, it is about building on existing knowledge and expertise.”  Dow’s childhood was spent in a traditional rural setting.  Her mother could not read English, and in most cases decision-making was a man’s domain.  After completing secondary school, she studied law at the Universities of Botswana and Swaziland, which included two years spent at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.  It was in Scotland, where she found herself one of the very few women in the law faculty.

In 2006, she was one of three Justices who served on a panel that decided the Bushmen of Kalahari were free to return to their ancestral land to continue their hunting traditions.

Before her appointment as a High Court Judge in 1998, she was able to win important advances in laws pertaining to child support, rape and married women’s property rights.

While making her first professional steps, Dow says she quickly came across an innate gender inequality built into law.

She went on to work with great success as a criminal prosecutor and a criminal defence attorney in Botswana. But her reputation shot up in the early 1990s when she was the plaintiff in a groundbreaking case that dealt with citizenship rights through the mothers of newborns.

“I was married to a non-citizen, and therefore my children were born to a Botswana and an American,” she said in a 2012 interview with CNN. “I was shocked to realise that in terms of the law,my children were not Botswana citizens because I was not male.” Dow thought the law was unfair and embarked on a mission to make it unconstitutional. The long-running legal battle attracted huge media coverage in Botswana.

(Supportive and additional material from CNN and Wikipedia).