A message to the people

* DUMA BOKO | Wednesday December 22, 2010 00:00

I, and the Botswana National Front, join in this spirit of the moment and extend our best wishes to the nation and peoples of Botswana. It is important to take time off to mark and celebrate any successes we may have attained in the year. We need to also ponder the challenges and shortcomings that we faced. Doing so will help us avoid turning this into a time merely for the gracious exchange of flattery. It should be a time for evaluation and rededication. For those of us in the political frontline, a sober reflection on the circumstances of our country and the wellbeing of its people is required. Some consideration of the nature of our present government, its policies and institutions is unavoidable as we examine the substance and depth of our democracy as well as the direction of our development.

On a congenial note, I send my warmest regards to the President of this Republic. I do so in the sincere hope that he and his followers may appreciate that our being at different poles of political engagement does not make us enemies. We will differ sharply on many issues, criticise each other forcefully; sometimes viciously, but we must strive always to do so honestly and respectfully. This is a lesson the President needs to impart to his Vice President. Trading insults, especially on the floor of Parliament, only expresses intellectual vacuity. I wish you, Mr. President, continued good health. Physical fitness and stamina you seem to have in abundance judging from your recent performances in the Fat Boy Challenge. If there is anything we can all learn from this President, it is to value healthy eating habits and vigorous exercise. They are key to our wellness. Thank you Mr. President for reminding the nation of this. I urge you, to intensify efforts in this regard by ensuring that your government establishes and maintains cycling routes and decent walkways across our towns and cities. That you develop our hills and hillocks into fitness centres by constructing hiking trails to attract young and old to engraft exercise into their daily routine. Efforts of this nature would have the twin advantages of mitigating environmental pollution and easing traffic congestion on our roads as it would be convenient and attractive for people to cycle or walk to work or in their other chores. This might turn out to be your single redeeming contribution to this nation. Consider it very seriously!

I would like to recognise, and extend warm fraternal wishes to, the leaders and members of other opposition parties as well as the entire trade union movement in this country. To the trade union movement, I adopt, as my own, the words uttered by August Spies, one of the labour activists executed in the aftermath of the 1886 workers' strike in Chicago, USA. He said from the dock, 'If you think that by hanging us you can stamp the labour movement -if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there behind you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out!'

We issue the same potent warning to the government and other employers. We urge and encourage trade unions to join forces with us and intensify the struggle for living wages and decent conditions of service. This is a fight for your interests and the interests of generations to come. We also challenge all NGOs in this country to maintain vigilance in their various programmes and be exemplary in the practices of good governance. Alternation of leadership and power must not only be something they demand of others, they must also practice it themselves!

For a while, over the last few weeks, we endured the scorching heat of our unpredictable weather. Global warming seemed to visit a peculiar viciousness on our country. All this drove home the message of the Botswana National Front, that to leave our agricultural sector to the vagaries of this weather is to condemn the majority of our people to abject poverty and misery. Our abiding message of the introduction of irrigation farming on a massive scale across the country remains as critically relevant in this day as it always has been over the last forty-four years.

The BNF maintains that position and presents it as part of its calculus of policy instruments and strategies to turn around the agricultural sector. That the policies of the Botswana Democratic Party have dismally failed is grudgingly acknowledged by the BDP itself in its admission that our people are still ravaged by debilitating levels of poverty.

In sharp contrast to the Botswana Democratic Party, we in the Botswana National Front regard poverty as a gross violation of the human rights of our people and ascribe the grinding deprivation that systematically handicaps this country to the fatally flawed programmes of successive BDP regimes. We have consistently dismissed the BDP's approach as bad economics, worse politics! It is for these reasons that we reject the over-inflated fanfare and pompous anti-poverty rhetoric of this government. Their mock solemnity is exploded by the predatory land grabbing of their Minister of Lands and Housing whose bully boy tactics have seen him repossess land from the poor and sink them further into poverty. The poverty of our people is exacerbated by this government's failure to guarantee living wages for those in employment. As a result, many reach retirement age and retire poor only to depend on an old age payment of P 220 per month on which they must continue to clothe and feed their families!This is a horrific mutilation of our people's human rights.

We must state and emphasise that as the government persists in its gushing torrent of anti-poverty talk, the Basarwa of the CKGR are still denied the fundamental right to water! Their muted pleas and desperate cries for help have not attracted even a tincture of compassion from the government and its High Court. The cries have been amplified and projected onto the world stage by Survival International. These cries were chronicled with precision and analysed in a most rigorous scholarly fashion by Professor James Anaya, the UN Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples' Rights sent to investigate the matter. We call on the government to redeem itself and repair its tattered international image. We must remind the nation, that the situation of the CKGR is a culmination of BDP policies begun many years ago, enforced with sadistic brutality by former President Mogae, and continued without demurrer by the current President. The problem is not Survival International. The problem is the BDP and the callousness of its government!

The large numbers of new members we have welcomed from the BDP into the BNF over the last few months attest to the fact that the naive optimism the voters may have had in the BDP has now given way to soaring outrage.

The stability attained by our party after its elective Congress this year has given renewed hope and confidence to the membership of the party and the nation at large. We recognise the many members of the party who have now come forward to visibly participate in shaping the destiny of the BNF. I encourage all our members to intensify the rebirth and regeneration of the party in 2011 and the months leading up to the next national elections.

We reiterate our concern and indeed the concern of many of our people, that the forty-four years of BDP government have seen the country slip and slide into a sub-variant of autocracy. Many would like to blame the current President for this erosion of democratic values. This approach is not only simplistic, it is plain wrong in many respects. This President is not the architect of the many institutions that have eroded our democracy. Yes he is a beneficiary of automatic succession, but he is not its architect. In fact, to be fair to the man, he was not even the first beneficiary of this system, Festus Mogae was! We in the BNF vigorously opposed this practice then.We still do.

The erosion of whatever little inner party democracy there ever was in the BDP was not begun by President Ian Kgama. Great care and consideration went into the drafting and amendment of the BDP constitution long before he assumed the leadership of the party. The vesting of absolute power, including the power to undermine democratically-elected officers and structures of the party, in one person has always been a trademark feature of the political ethos of the BDP. That President Kgama is a beneficiary of this tragic edifice does not make him its designer. In a curious way, the constitution of this country establishes and promotes a Presidency which though not the product of direct popular election, is hugely more powerful than a Parliament elected by majoritarian choice. To this extent, the anti-democratic ethos of the BDP is simply writ large on the national stage. All the previous Presidents embraced and presided over this sordid spectacle and all are an embodiment of the BDP's distaste for democracy. That is why our enduring stance in the BNF has consistently been that the problem is not Ian Kgama or indeed any single leader of the BDP, the real problem is the BDP itself! The difference between the current President and his predecessors is simply that where they pretended and prevaricated, he is clear and unequivocal in his disdain for Parliament. That is why he only attends there to deliver his State of the Nation address, listen to his own voice and leave.

Other problems afflicting our democracy are more systemic. There is no denying that Botswana has hitherto been a classical case of a dominant party democracy. The pathologies of this dominant party lead inevitably to our characterisation of the country as a sub-variant of autocracy. This party has engaged in blatant cadre deployment, planting its party functionaries in key positions in the civil service and all State-Owned Enterprises as well as any others it regards as strategic. This has made the entire system unaccountable and mired in power arrogance. It has bred an unashamed deployment of public resources for partisan political purposes. The government also engages in pork barrel politics described by K. F. Greene as providing 'subsidies, tax breaks, licences, contracts, price supports, loans, ... economic protection that are directed to political supporters, in exchange for votes or political contributions.'

All these practices have resulted in a weak and manipulable governance apparatus serving the interests of the BDP. Hiring, firing and career advancement is not based on merit. Mediocrity has been institutionalised and sycophancy is glorified. Many able and talented individuals are frustrated out of work or broken down to succumb to the logic of this corrupt arrangement. That is why even a cursory inquiry by our newspapers confirms what we have always stated as the BNF, that all beneficiaries of government programmes are selected BDP members who in turn corruptly fund the party and loot public resources.

As a party presiding over a state apparatus sustained by micro-networks of patronage, institutionalised corruption and graft, the BDP can only compete with some of the worst on the African continent. We reject the characterisation of Botswana as least corrupt, by such organisations as Transparency International. This is plainly naive and underpinned by myriad master fallacies. We who are intimately familiar with the lived realities of this country and its institutions know better. We pronounce with Normanton that BDP misrule has left the country hostage to 'the courtiers, the clique, the gang, the lobby clientele, the notables and the favourites'.

I conclude on a most traumatic note for the BDP: The BNF is back and in full voice. It is busy finalising the rebuilding of its structures across the country. A resurgent BNF is the single most potent threat to the BDP. We have, in typical BNF style, begun to sink our arrow shafts into the central nervous system of this corrupt regime. We will intensify our coordinated activities in the new year as we rally our people and other opposition partners in what should be the final onslaught against tyranny, corruption and chronic misrule.

I wish all our people a joyous and restful festive period.

KOPANO KE MAATLA!

* BOKO is president of the Botswana National Front