Reflection on the state of our nation
Duma Boko | Friday June 5, 2015 16:31
Lives are severely disrupted. Businesses are poised perilously on the brink of collapse, with many facing imminent closure. The result is a further swelling of the ranks of the unemployed, plunging yet more of our people, young and old, into abject poverty and the grinding indecencies of privation.
We spoke to, and of, a frustrated nation. The country is mystified and perplexed at the deafening silence of its President during these moments of sore distress. The President of this country lives in his own manufactured world of contrived reality. He fails to realise that the crises precipitated by his corrupt and incompetent leadership and administration are a danger to the peace and stability of the country. He fails to appreciate that the counterfeit peace of stagnation and conformity that he exacts from his own followers will soon turn into crippling strife. He does not seem to care that his style of leadership has paralysed the civil service and reduced it to a compulsive passivity.
Our people cry out for the basics of water and electricity to a government that has lost all sense of moral legitimacy. The people express a legitimate expectation arising from a solemn undertaking made to them by the President that load shedding would be a thing of the past. He gave a time frame. Our press recorded his undertaking and began the countdown to the moment of promise. That moment exposed an embarrassing fissure between his promise and reality. The astonishing levels of corruption over which this President has presided have pushed our country to the edges of catastrophe. Our post-election reality has extirpated all the fallacies, myths and nonsense dished out by this regime in the lead up to the elections. Not content with the billions already squandered on Morupule B, the government continues to pour an ever mounting torrent of money into the wasteful venture of covering up its astounding failures.
When their age-old claim that there was no alternative was exposed and exploded by the UDC the BDP changed tune and begged to be allowed to “take Botswana forward.” Realising that our people have begun to reject crushing poverty as their settled fate and have now invested their faith and confidence in the UDC the BDP has now reconciled itself with the fact that power is slipping away from it. They have resorted to bribery and yet more corruption in a futile effort to save themselves. They have dusted an old strategy and refined it to involve massive funding from certain business interests with a long history of involvement in our mineral sector. We are fully aware of this strategy and all the individuals and institutions involved in it. We know that a whole team of intelligence operatives has been unleashed with clear instructions to target and bring down UDC leaders especially its members of parliament. We know that this project enjoys massive funding. We know that the regime has profiled its targets and mapped out a way of striking at each of them.
The strategy involves on the one hand the identification of any vulnerabilities on the part of the target members. These will then be used as a point of entry to intimidate and emasculate. The coup de grace will then be monetary and job offers to remove the representative from Parliament. I draw notice to this development in order to sound a warning to all our members and the nation at large.
Among the most vocal critics of this regime in relation to corruption was James Mathokgwane. He spoke out against the Black Operation that took out one of the UDC’s finest leaders, Gomolemo Motswaledi. He cried out against this selfsame strategy of the BDP to lure its critics with gifts of cash and jobs. He spoke out against the staggering levels of corruption in institutions such as Central Statistics Office. He asked pointed and uncomfortable questions on the floor of Parliament on issues of corruption. He was an articulate and feisty spokesperson for the Constituency of Goodhope-Mabule. He became, we realise with the wisdom of hindsight, the priority target.
The regime sought and found, it would appear, certain fatal vulnerabilities on his part. It exploited these. It invoked two levers of corruption to leave him dripping blood and filth from every pore. It offered him a protection from the “imminence” of annihilation. It undertook to immunise him from the agonies of any due process. The State undertook to subvert the course of justice and in so doing subverted the rule of law. Justice Brandeis eloquently and evocatively explained as far back as 1928 in Olmstead v United States that, “In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.” Whatever frills and excuses this government may present it has lost all purchase on legitimacy and the allegiance of right thinking citizens. We must all rise in unison and say “Not in our name!”
At the second level, this regime acted in complete disregard of all procedure and propriety in creating a position that was never part of the organisational structure of SPEDU and was never discussed and approved by the governing Board of the organisation. The position commands a salary and a slew of benefits that were never part of the organisational repertoire of SPEDU. All these were done with the complicity of a CEO who himself was a political appointee having been outperformed for the position by a more deserving candidate whose only downside was that he did not have any BDP membership. We know these things. They are an affront to any sense of justice and propriety. Trapped and enmeshed in the thrall of these unseen compulsions the target was stripped of all dignity and integrity. He became a willing hostage, ready to sing in his chains. He has joined a world of confused identities and sinister powers; of force and fraud.
The position of Director of Regional Operations at SPEDU is an illegality and a fraud. It is a deft piece of trickery played by the most corrupt and unscrupulous President and his hirelings. An instruction came from the highest levels of Government. The management of SPEDU was summoned to Gaborone. In a matter of a few hours the position of Director of Regional Operations was conjured up from nowhere. It did not exist and was never part of the structure long approved by the Board. An emergency Board meeting scheduled for this past Monday was cancelled. It was intended as a platform to coerce the Board into sanctioning, ex post festem, this egregious abuse of power. Contrary to the falsehoods being fed the nation, there were no interviews for the position. It was created for one purpose and one purpose only: to complete the mission of removing the Goodhope-Mabule constituency from the UDC and affording the moribund BDP a second bite at the cherry. The strategy of blackmail, bribery and corruption has succeeded in rendering the parliamentary position vacant.
The fraud and deception carried out has robbed the people of Goodhope-Mabule of their elected representative. The Presidency of this country determined that the decision of the electorate must be undermined and frustrated.
The President decided that the resources of the country must be applied to sponsor and entrench corruption. He decided that he must use our tax Pula to undermine the rule of law and reward his incorrigibly degraded and corrupt circle of cronies. In this whole fraudulent exercise the State deployed the crushing and insidious power of money and manipulation to sabotage democracy, insult the electorate and, in the ultimate instance, expose the ruthlessness of this regime. It will do anything to extend its lease on power. It will bribe, blackmail and kill to stay in power.
The UDC would like to express and maintain the hope, if not the confidence, that the people of Goodhope-Mabule will see through all the disguises and smokescreens of the BDP and assert the social resilience that saw them reject the BDP and elect a candidate who gave them a voice. That voice broke the long tormented silence of their constituency.
That voice was theirs. Their representative was not merely a placeholder to be manipulated and humiliated by the BDP. Their voice must not be silenced by the predations of this government. They must seize the moment to reassert themselves. The UDC remains the only voice and shield of all the citizens of this country. It is not a movement for superficial sloganeering. It is a whole that is bigger and better than the sum of its constituent parts.
To all our leaders and members I would like to say that this is not a moment for self-righteous banality. We are prosecuting a revolution here. And as George Jackson reminded us, revolution “isn’t cool or romantic, it’s bold and vicious; it’s stalking and being stalked.” I call on all our members and the entire nation to gird up and reclaim our country from the clutches of this corrupt tyranny.
*Duma Gideon Boko is the
President of the Umbrella
for Democratic Change