Golden Jubilee Awards Recognise Founding Fathers
Correspondent | Monday October 3, 2016 16:46
As will become evident during the course of our ceremony, those being honoured were drawn from across the country with a diversity of backgrounds. They came to public service from different races and merafe as teachers, small business men, farmers and clergy, as well as dikgosi.
As diverse as they were, 50 years ago each of today’s honourees were united by a common, courageous vision of realising a free and independent Botswana based on common citizenship, with common rights and responsibilities.
I wish to here underscore word “courage” because, as former President Sir Ketumile Masire has aptly put it, at the time of our independence, there was indeed a general view among outsiders that the founders of this nation were either very brave or very foolish.Given the low levels of human resource and infrastructural development at the time, as well as our status as a landlocked country surrounded by hostile minority rule regimes, the naysayers of our independence saw little prospect in our reaching out for the political kingdom.
Some self-styled sophisticates even counselled that our best path for survival was to subordinate ourselves to the Apartheid regime.
The wisdom as well as courage of our nation’s founding generation has of course been long vindicated by this country’s subsequent record of economic and social progress, which saw us graduate from one of the world 10 least developed nations into upper middle income status.
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, it would have thus been remiss of us to have celebrated our Golden Jubilee without stepping back to give specific acknowledgement to many of the patriots who made this joyous occasion possible.
Because of the special nature of these awards, sadly many of today’s recipients have moved on to a better world, and are thus being here represented by family members.
While some may therefore not be physically with us, they and other members of the golden generation will always be alive in our memories as the ones who made to bold decision to take us across the river into a brighter future.
The golden generation truly displayed the courage of their conviction in their own and their fellow citizen’s potential.
What, one might ask, accounted for this 1966 spirit of self confidence? It is a question that can exercise the minds of sociologists and historians.
From my own perspective, however, it seems clear that a critical element was the shared norms of social behaviour embedded in our communities.
Here I refer to the social cohesion and mobilisation that has been and should remain rooted in such time honoured practices as self-reliance, consultation, tolerance and mutual support, as grounded in our associated norms of Botho, Therisanyo and Kagisano.
If, as has often been said, in unity lies strength, Batswana of the past were very strong indeed. What they may have lacked in terms of material wealth they made up for in values that promoted a culture of Unity in diversity. Five decades later building on our “Unity in Diversity” remains a cornerstone in our ongoing nation building process.
Let us therefore be inspired by the rich legacies of the patriots we are honouring today to follow boldly in their footsteps in our journey to build a better Botswana.
Eric Molale - Minister of Presidential Affairs, Governance and Public Adminstaration, Gaborone