Was the honourable Kablay thinking or unthinking?

Michael Dingake | Tuesday February 17, 2015 16:56

 

Or what was he thinking or not thinking? Normally Honourable LK is one of those representatives who stay out of controversy by allowing the other MPs to hog the limelight by making all the sweet-nothing noises to bluff Batswana who elect them but are unacquainted with their precise duties once they are inside the august House; whether they draw condoms, snooze, tweet or engage in sending their Facebook posts to  friends or groups is no concern.

And non-MPs , the public, the rubric under which we all fall once we have finished our five-yearly stint at the polls, stay lulled. When ‘Dikgang tsa Parliament,’ item is presented, the name of Honourable LK of Letlhakeng East is seldom heard. So far the Honourable MP has been laid back, preferring to report back to his constituents what other MPs have had to say, not what he had to say.

This time probably motivated by a personal 2015 resolution, he decided to come out of his cocoon to enable colleagues to go back to their constituencies and report the words of wisdom he, LK  had  uttered in the 11th Parliament of Botswana.

Do I exaggerate by saying his were the words of wisdom to line the pages of the Hansards since the institution of Parliament was created? Maybe, maybe not. You see, the motion sounds so wisecrack, it makes one wonder why so many MPs , in so many Parliaments, in so many countries  for centuries never thought of this grand idea of making the civil service a private property of the  ruling party?

Or did they and were too timid to blurt it out with the gusto Honourable LK did?  We know about democracy of course, our preferred form of government: Regular elections of representatives, doing things according to the rule of law, checks and balances of the three arms of government  -  the Legislature, the Executive  the Judiciary and the non-partisanship of the public service. All these features of democracy aren’t always easy to know, let alone to appreciate particularly in young democracies. In ancient regimes, loyalty to the sovereign, king or kgosi was the be-all and end-all of the government system. I suspect the Honourable MP must have been wrestling with the apparent lack of loyalty in the civil service, maybe even suspicious that some of the ‘good’ programmes of his dear BDP were being sabotaged by the disloyal civil servants of the opposition. Just a thought. That being the case, the BDP members would be ideal employees to serve the public interest,  through Kablay’s ‘party’ interest eyes!

Of course he would be wrong to equate party interest with public interest. Democracy, differs with monarchy, bogosi or dictatorship. In democracies, different viewpoints are acceptable unlike in dictatorships where one viewpoint prevails. Ruling party interest doesn’t necessarily coincide with the public interest, except when manipulated as Honourable LK ‘s party so often does with the danger of exposing its limited commitment to the democratic process!

The same way Hon LK’s advocates his new-fangled civil service. I wonder whether Hon LK doesn’t sense the blatant discrimination inherent in his motion. Employment is at the moment a life and death issue in which all the Botswana political parties agree. Hiring only members of a certain tribe, region, pigmentation, sex, or political party would be flagrant discrimination and ultra vires the constitution. Doesn’t my good friend LK realise that? Yes, we are friends, and relatives-in-law with LK; we know each other’s political affiliations and don’t care a hoot about these.

But I tell you, were either of us in need of a job and either had a vacancy, we wouldn’t hesitate to employ each other in our private employment hives! Political parties don’t make enemies of one another, only rivals. What was in the mind of Honourable MP, to develop such animosity to non-BDP Batswana this time? 

Politicians to politicians, I think we must disabuse one another of such unpatriotic, undemocratic, base and unworkable solutions to the many challenges we have as a nation. The challenges call for humane, not inhuman applications, pragmatic not impractical decisions, wise not unwise answers to challenges, probable not improbable solutions.

The more you think of LK’s proposal the more you see it as un-workable even if some party were to be foolish enough to try to implement it.

To begin with, does the BDP currently have sufficient membership numbers to run the civil service without non-BDP party members? I doubt. I also doubt whether maDomkraga would prefer to work only in the public service instead of farming their lands, running their businesses as tenderpreneurs, managing their firms as professionals or  serving on prestigious private corporate boards and so forth. Honourable Kablay’s ideal public service machinery would discover before takeoff that it was dysfunctional. Sans nuts, sans bolts sans bobejan spanners to start and keep it maintained to deliver the service it needed to deliver to the public.

But assuming Hon LK’s scheme had the human-power, necessary skills and the goodwill of the rest of non-BDP members citizens, who could guarantee non-factionalism within the party conglomerate? Would those bypassed for promotions, recruitment for prestigious vacancies and circulated around parastatal boards or specially selected for Parliamentary and council seats ,sit back and sing, ‘all is well, all is well’ (ho lokile ho lokile)? Shall we ask Hon LK to think constructively how to deliver quality services to Batswana and cease this unthinking that makes him a laughing stock?