Tsimane�s asylum application
Correspondent | Thursday September 11, 2014 11:59
I request from your esteemed office an urgent asylum from your country Sir as a result of scary situation presently obtaining in Botswana. The reason why I seek your good office to accord me asylum stems from serious and imminent threats and intimidation I am receiving from the Botswana State security apparatus based on a dossier that will follow below.
I must point out from the onset that it is pointless and would also be dangerous for me to report this matter to the Botswana Police Services as it is cowed by the Directorate of Intelligence and Security (DIS). In fact the Botswana Police Services has since become part of the problem.
My employer is treating the imminent threat to my life lightly and I suspect on the unfortunate belief that the possible killing of a journalist in Botswana is far fetched. The reality is that we are not very far from that.
Why I suspect that I may be assassinated by the State security apparatus
My elder brother, Clement Batsile Tsimane, is an agent at DIS, which he joined around 2009 when I had been practising journalism for 10 years. He was previously in the Botswana Defence Force (BDF). In the military he was a communications technician under a unit known as “Signals”. I do not know what type of work he does at the DIS as I have never bothered to ask him. I never discuss with him matters relating to his work. On the other hand he has consistently shown a keen interest in my work.
On the night of Tuesday 2 September 2014 at 20:02, I received a call from Clement, instructing me to stop writing “offensive” articles on the Botswana Presidency and the DIS with immediate effect. He asked me if I did not have anything newsworthy to write about other than in relation to the Presidency and the DISS, but did not give me a chance to ask why and explain myself.
I was not surprised at first because I suspected he was referring to a rebuttal by Government in the Daily News (a Botswana Government controlled daily newspaper) of Tuesday 2 September relating to a story I wrote and published in the Sunday Standard of 31 August 2014. Still, I felt it was a little awkward for him to call me at night particularly that the purpose of his call was not to discuss family matters. He went straight into my professional conduct - something which he has never done in the past; telling me how I was embarrassing the family. But what got me very worried and scared was when my brother began talking about three alleged offending articles on bagolo (literal for, “elders”, but denoting those high up the echelons of power) which I recently wrote.
The offending articles in question are: DIS plans to turn Botswana into a Giant Guantanamo style detention centre (available online at www.sundaystandard.info); Khama deports British citizen available on hard copy of The Telegraph newspaper (article attached) and President hit in car accident while driving alone at night (available online at www.sundaystandard.info.
My brother sternly warned me to immediately stop writing articles similar to the ones mentioned above, as according to him; he had information that I was putting both my life and that of the family at risk. As a practising journalist this is a tall order for me. My conviction tells me otherwise, but the whole thing now has been thrown at my elderly parents to bear the heavy burden of a security apparatus that is busy telling one of its agents to gag his younger journalist brother.
Following my brother’s nocturnal call, I have been receiving strange and rather unusual calls on my mobile phone. Suspicious looking men have been frequenting my workplace asking for me and when they are told that I am not available and asked to leave their contacts, they would decline. I feel that I am under constant surveillance.
The Sunday Standard newspaper is arguably the leading authority in investigative journalism in Botswana and has on numerous occasions irked the Botswana Government by carrying out exposes on issues such as high level corruption, extra judicial killings and abuse of Executive power, to name a few. Presently, the newspaper is fighting in the High Court of Botswana a case in which the State seeks to gag it from reporting on systematic corruption involving billions of Pula perpetrated by the Director General of DIS. This week the Commissioner of Botswana Police called my deputy editor, Spencer Mogapi, for a meeting at which the Commissioner made it clear that Botswana Government was viewing my article on the President’s car accident as a national security threat. Despite the Commissioner’s veiled threat, I stand by the story.
Intimidating me using my parents
I have a very strong suspicion that my brother made the Tuesday 2 September 2014 call under duress and most probably at the instance of his superiors at DIS as a way of nudging on me. After one hour of receiving the call from my brother, my mother rang me at 21:07 hours the same night. I did not answer my mother’s call as I concluded, based on my suspicion and instincts of a journalist, that she was going to raise her concerns about the same issue raised by my brother. I did not want to say anything to my mother or any member of my family other than my brother until I had spoken to my editors.
The suspicions I had the previous night that my mother was going to talk about the same issue were confirmed the following day when my father also called me at work on Wednesday 3 September 2014 at 09:59 hours saying I must heed my brother’s advice on the matter subsequently requesting a meeting between me and him.
Your Honour, I stand by all the alleged offending stories in question because sources of my stories are ordinary citizens with no political connections whatsoever and they do not have an axe to grind with government. Why would an ordinary female worker at a lodge tell me something they feel is awkward involving a Head of State? What do they stand to achieve and benefit? What really? The citizens of Botswana are witnessing things they have never seen or heard before. The State uses its powerful machinery to quash all forms of dissent and the private press is at the top end of these maneuvers.
What did I do after receiving the call from my brother?
The same night of the call of Tuesday 2 September 2014 from my brother, I rang Khonani Ontebetse, my work colleague who stays in the same neighborhood of Block 9 in Gaborone asking him to come to my place to hear what I had just been told over the phone, but he told me he was already going to bed. I made several attempts to contact the editor of the Sunday Standard, Outsa Mokone, but could not reach him. I was able to contact the deputy editor Spencer Mogapi on his mobile and briefly narrated to him what I had just been told. We agreed to talk about the issue in detail the following day.
On Wednesday morning 3 September around l1.am, I had a meeting with Mogapi and told him details of the conversations I had with my brother the previous night and my father in the morning of the same Wednesday. Mogapi assured me that Tsodilo Pty would accord me the necessary protection as an employee without saying what such protection would entail. He did not seem to see the intimidation and threats to my life as seriously I as I do.
Your Honour, I am not a qualified authority to begin to tell you that journalists are killed the world over by rogue States knowing very well that your Government has been one of the most vocal in condemning such barbaric acts whenever they occur, but the painful reality is that journalists continue to die in their line of duty with or without warning.
For example, I wrote an article on Carlos Cardoso while on assignment in Mozambique in 2010 commemorating a decade since he was killed. He was one of the many journalists killed by paranoid regimes.
I may soon be the next Cardoso because what I write is regarded, by Botswana’s wayward security apparatus DIS, as stepping on the toes of the current regime. As I have said, the regime is using my brother to win sympathy from my parents to label me an outcast who is an embarrassment to the Tsimane family and in the whole process absolving my brother from the dastardly acts committed and continuing to be committed by an establishment which by all intents and purposes has become unashamedly the country’s number one security threat at the behest of the President.
I love my family; I love my country; I love my job, but I fear my Government.
Your Honour, it is not business as usual in Botswana. I trust that your office shall treat this matter urgently and do something to protect me to allow me to do the job of the profession I love - journalism because the protection guaranteed by my employer goes as far as litigation not protection from physical harm.