Botswana Democratic Party: Where is my beloved country?

Correspondent | Friday June 5, 2015 14:59

I see the pity with which the citizenry was taken for a ride by the villainous and arrogant imperialist force to realise its malevolent goal of continuing to fleece.

I cannot find any reason to justify this injustice, except to blame it on the ignorance of the trodden down, who returned to power the same conspicuous evil they are accustomed to. This provides evidence for what Karl Marx identified in his famous book namely: Das Kapital, in which he points out that capitalism promotes individuality, competitiveness and conspicuous consumption.

What Karl Marx noted confirms what obtains in our nation, where we struggle hourly, daily and monthly to overcome maladies and economic vicissitudes as individuals, competing against each other for a few positions on the job market and resources that are now only for the BDP members, their foreign friends and their children, without realising that we are facing a regime worse than the Apartheid regime that subjected blacks in South Africa to wanton human suppression and discrimination.

If positions of power and resources of our beloved country are only for the BDP members and their foreign friends, and the rest of us stand at akimbo to embrace and accept this situation as what defines our existence, we should blame ourselves for our sufferings and the continued throttle of the poor by the rich.

If we unashamedly admire a few who exhibit their loot fleeced from State coffers and label that as some paragon of excellence, we cannot blame our ancestors for our self-inflicted calamities.    

When BDP was returned to power it had become evident that it failed in all fronts to ameliorate the living conditions of those submerged in abject poverty, reduce exploitation, curb corruption through appropriate sentencing, failed to feed the nation, allowed the sale of our country to foreigners, not to mention its failure to avail utilities and embark on well thought-out citizen empowerment programmes.

It is difficult to exonerate the voters for their historic mistake of giving power to the same evil to continue the mortification of the underprivileged by donating to them, instead of empowering them to meet their exigencies without depending on the malevolent gestures of treachery.

As they voted for the BDP they brought upon us who did not, the deadweight of morass of corruption, malversation, corporate incest, unemployment, censorship by rancorous state apparatus, limitation of political rights, failing education system, demonisation of those opposed to Ngwato hegemony and killing of the poor by the rich mistaking them for dogs.

My beloved country is languishing under the Bretton Woods system with BDP deliberately failing our education system to render our beloved youth unemployable, to satisfy the demand for the minimisation of the wage bill.  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is interested in the cutting of the wage bill so that Third World citizens can remain unemployed.

This situation will result in revolutions getting instigated, crime rising, civil disobedience and insubordination, which will justify spending in acquisition of security equipment and weapons from developed countries by the Third World.

Those who voted for the BDP actually voted for Bretton Woods policies under the illusion that they still had a country to call their own.

We should not exonerate the atrocious State apparatus and blame the voters only, because according to Louis Althusser, the poor are often physically molested into submission.

I also know that they are indoctrinated to accept their perilous existence as a punishment for their evil deeds by their creator and they also comply so as to attract the mercy of the purgatory. Under the BDP we have been inebriated to blame nature for our shortened existence.

Our actuality is marred with desolation, indignation, poverty, illiteracy, desire to die, mental subjugation and futility.

But as Antonio Gramsci observed, the evil that weighs upon us happens because we abdicate to their will; allow laws to be promulgated that only a revolution could nullify, we whimper piously, we curse obscenely and we do not ask ourselves,

“If we had tried to impose our will would this have happened?”  I concur with Gramsci because when the regime introduced the plastic tax we felt it was nothing to worry about, when the alcohol levy was imposed churches ululated, when the chiefs received their knock the media hooted and it is now the time for UB students, judiciary, media, clergy and proletariats to pay the ultimate price. It is only vacillating for the sycophants to chuckle because their turn to “kiss dust” is on the way.

I watch with dismay as youths in our beloved country are reduced to beggars that jump the stage of middle adulthood, speedily gravitating from childhood to old age and death. It saddens me to witness God’s creation subjected to human contrived humiliation characterised by horripilate faces, reddish lips from excessive partaking of noxious drugs, darkened hands and malodorous smell from heavy smoking and accumulated dirt and shattered dreams from failure to own some piece of land before where the resting place would be.

The BDP has subjugated our beloved nation to a state of anguish and metathesiophobia (Fear of change). I do not expect any BDP member to be in the state of “deer in the headlights” when the day of justice dawn, when those who have helplessly sulked receive their relief and freedom gets restored. 

My hope from this excruciating hurt of human misery we are subjected to by the BDP is that, someday we will wake up to a revolutionary command of our ancestors, which no amount of brutal force can break. 

We will sing liberation and victory songs and state machinery wouldn’t listen to any evil command, the sycophants will join us having regained their mindfulness from the epoch of distress. 

The foreigners will leave our country to where they were born, leaving us to find our beloved country that they have taken from us. It is when they have joined The Golden Dawn in Greece, National Front in France, British National Party in Britain that they will openly demonstrate how fiend they are.  

Do not forget that according to J.R.R. Tolkien, “There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for”.

Dama Mosweunyane, Mahalapye