Donkey meat for export sounds fantastic!
Michael Dingake | Tuesday September 13, 2016 16:41
Any littlest departure for destination prosperity is worth celebrating and celebrating ecstatically. Finding an export market for a commodity the country has in abundance is proper and commendable.
Here is something we have, and can profitably share with others who deliciously need it. It is worth celebrating with song, dance, whistles and ululations. Botswana has been talking diversification long before the donkeys learnt to bray and now appears to be the time to walk the talk!
According to the newspaper story, the issuance of permits for donkey meat export, follows a 2002 feasibility study conducted in Botswana on the possibility of exporting donkey meat to Europe.
According to the story the then Minister of Agriculture, Johnny Swartz had told Parliament that private entrepreneurs had conducted trial slaughter of donkeys and taken samples for analysis abroad with the hope of supplying a section of the European market.
What puzzles me and I daresay many Batswana, is that this potentially lucrative market has been known for the past 14 years, without any serious follow-up step, to exploit it; are we so indolent of mind, we find it hard/impossible to follow up glaring opportunities?
Or is it perhaps simply because donkey meat is an untraditional menu in the Setswana cuisine culture, or just why is it this market took this long to exploit, while our economic language was consistently diversification and more diversification?
How serious may our leadership be in pursuing the diversification route? Do we take diversification project to be limited to manufacturing, technology, services, the arts etc and not farming?
Two decades ago, there was a hype about ostrich farming. Suddenly the hype fizzled out quicker than it had surged. We no longer heard about the lucrative market of the ostrich bird. Not only is the bird’s meat a delicacy, sought after by foreign restaurants abroad, but a delicacy enjoyed by the wanderlust, well-heeled of our species we woe passionately to our shores - the foreign tourist; the feathers, the eggs and egg shells, the skin and perhaps the beak and claws of this largest bird may have some aphrodisiac or medicinal properties hidden somewhere inside the bird.
Without doubt, the ostrich seems to be a marvelous bird whose value to the inquisitive mind has not been explored. My bafflement is as a people who badly would like to diversify the economy, add value and make it serve our people, help them live a good life, we don’t seem to focus on how this will’o’the wisp objective we are determined to achieve, can be achieved we seem to be floundering in our efforts; why the distraction?
Botswana has a comparative advantage vis a vis other countries: mineral resources beneath the soil; the unique fauna and the flora, a river - the Okavango ,that doesn’t flow into the sea but pours its waters into the soil to conserve and save it from the evaporation of the scorching sun for use in the dry years; our plants’ roots and leaves have medicinal properties to prolong human life and its betterment for the foreseeable future; who can deny Batswana children seem on the average to possess high intelligence quotient (IQ) if one observes that without any educational background, born of illiterate parents nevertheless, take to academic studies like a duckling to water: to become medical doctors, scientists, theologians, engineers and lawyers etc!
We are a nation born in a paradisiacal environment, though apparently cursed with the stigma of a dependency syndrome. We are prone to wait for strangers from other lands to show us the way.
We kneel down to pray to God to spoon-feed us, to do everything on our behalf when He has given us the eyes, the mind, the hands, to see, think and do for ourselves what we pester Him to do for us! What Batswana urgently require is a leadership that can see with their own eyes reinforced by the eyes of their followers, to think with their minds and do with their God-given hands, what they need to do, to lead the country and the inhabitants into the prosperity we all hanker after.
Do we perhaps suffer from memory lapse whereby we conjure up things, but later to forget what we had conjured up, thereby shelving the doables which sooner than later become the undoables?
We think diversification and even how to diversify, but in less than a shake of a dove’s tail, we suffer a sickly amnesia! We have identified diversification, let’s diversify without waiting for a nag, a prompter!
Donkey meat export should give Botswana a lift towards raking in the dollars, the yuans, the yens the rupees, the euros and other currencies.
Donkey meat might move us into a bracket of trade surpluses; we are blessed with a comparative advantage over other nations. The donkey is one of the many. We mustn’t be like Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana Homeland who directed that the Bantustan be depopulated of the donkey animal.
Mangope was of course a blinkered stooge of his Bantustan bosses who defamed the donkey with a derogatory ditty: “Oh, die donkie ….die donkie is n wonderlike ding…. Hy poep, hy skop, die donkie is n wonderlike ding” (the donkey is a wonderful thing/animal he farts, he kicks….).
Batswana have never expressed hostility to the donkey animal, only neglectfulness; though Batswana domesticated the donkey they haven’t derived the maximum benefit from it as they should; now is the time to do it.