The greatest gift to humanity is the possibility to belong

| Tuesday June 1, 2010 00:00

Men and women who make our societies live in special permutations of wards, villages, towns and cities. We belong first to immediate families, then to clans, nations, regions, continents and, unfortunately too, to races.

Surely Sidney Pilane belongs in all these categories. There have been noises, loud noises, by those well placed to know better. Our media has not helped the cause. I write here to urge hands off Advocate Sidney Pilane. I argue that we have to refocus the debate. It is not about the man, it is all about what he thinks. If we are not cowards, let us engage with what he thinks, not what or where he drinks. For God's sake, let us talk about issues! Precisely because even if you were to prohibit, denationalise and deport Sidney Pilane, the problems he is pointing to would remain unresolved.

I write in response to flurry of articles that have appeared on our newspaper columns mainly provoked by a letter to the Attorney General Attaliah Molokomme penned by Dickson Lecha. I have reacted with complete shock and disbelief at the paucity of rationale in that brief and the total lack of reflection by the author on the issues raised.

The self-evidently excited letter was, in my estimation, grossly unfortunate on several grounds. The first of these being that it came from one of the leading lights of this country, who is a lecturer at the University of Botswana and one who should be trusted with calm and unclouded objectivity even in these exciting times.

Secondly, the letter seeks to define our nationhood in a narrow and colonially derived fashion, attaching - as it does - to our nationhood a myopic stigma of inward looking (attitude), which somehow we are all purported to share. Where is our sense of history? Have we not always been going to seek work in South Africa? Whether in the mealie farms of the platteland or in the mines of Egoli, Chimbali, Western Deep and other places? Re ya Makgoeng! Re makarapa a makonteraka mose! Now, what is wrong with Pilane having done what most Bakgatla, Batlokwa, Balete and Barolong do?

Thirdly, it calls into question the very wording in which our citizenship may be couched in the national constitution.Something which to me, adds to the many plausible reasons why the constitution should be subjected to a thorough-going review because we live in a globalised post-colonial world. Even in your zeal, Dr Lecha, you are going against the founding fundi, Sir Seretse Khama, who taught that our politics should always be couched in the language and culture that our people know.

But before we get carried away by the larger issues, let us first dispose with the petty and pitiable squabbles that we tend to accentuate to the level of the national agenda. The BDP leadership and its government who are allegedly now  seeking opinion on the status of Advocate Sidney Pilane (with a view to showing him the gate) seem indeed very short-sighted. Was it not the same party and government that not so long ago created, out of the blue, a new position of Adviser to the President and gave Pilane the plumb job? Was that not in recognition of his capabilities, or was it just another act of patronage? Was there not any vetting at the time for these legal trivia before the man was offered employment? How was he paid? As a citizen doing national duty or as a seconded expatriate in a deal between two sister states?

Under what type of legislation was the good advocate employed?  We have so far attributed the 'idiotocracy' that ruins our country's chances internationally to the ascendance in our national politics of a coterie of hand-picked, unschooled generalismo and forgotten the treacherous and often insidious role of quasi-embedded intellectuals who prefer to create little dialectics around what goes into their little stomachs instead of taking on the daunting challenges of national survival. I have many differences with the good advocate, but these are differences of opinion on how Botswana can be made a better place for all to live in, to grow and grow our children, to love our wives and guide our nation through trying times, and then die peacefully knowing that we have carried out our historic mission as a generation that was there on the day of our independence. And not the present stifling place of murder, armed robbery and suicide. We embody the best hopes of a people who value dissent and maintain that  Mmua lebe o bua la gagwe go re mona le ntle a tle a le tswe!. That the advocate is big-headed cannot be helped, just as some of us are standing on spindly and rickety legs. I shall be the first to confess that he makes many an opponent eat humble pie and that he can be disparaging when faced with idiocy, but that is no reason to temper with his basic human rights. He is a citizen, not just a subject. And this citizenship, what is it worth? The paper it is written on or much more? When can it be legally revoked? What of it is discretionary and what mandatory? Which leads me to address another disgrace regarding people that we have honoured with Botswana citizenship whom, when it suits our petty egos, we derogatorily refer to as Batswana Ba Dipampiri (Paper Batswana).

When are they going become 'BATSWANA TOTA, BATSWANA BA LETSOKU, KANA BATSWANA BA SEKEI? Do we care that these people have loved to come and stay with us, giving us their lives and their future generations? And pay tax to our government? Do we agree with the kind of negative designation of others; those who have chosen to come and live with us this way? What right does our gesture of citizenship entail? Isn't a citizenship a right to one's own piece of earth, something that cannot be given or taken away lightly? What are the international conventions of citizenship? In other words, what are people deprived of citizenship? Non-people? Orphans without homes or nations? What is the period that our laws allow for being 'in limbo' in betwixt and between national borders like a reject from heaven and hell? When do such people become just Batswana?

We know that nations grow by intercourse with each other. It is not always easy, especially where people mistake jingoism for nationalism, to forge mutually beneficial relationships. Bakgatla-ba-ga-Kgafela, of which Sidney Pilane is a royal scion (just as the all powerful Minister of Justice, the army, the police and the prisons Brigadier Dikgakgamatso Ramadeluka Seretse is a scion of the Khama dynasty) are the principal authorities in Moruleng in South Africa. Should we severe our link with Moruleng? Or should our South African cousins understand that we are nationally riled by the thought that one Motswana could also have their citizenship?  

Poo eo ke  Mokgatla fela wa ngwana-a-nkoko. In this country, the Pilanes can only come from Mochudi and other places in Kgatleng, where they are royalty, in case someone didn't know! They are legitimate rulers in Mochudi in Botswana and in Moruleng in South Africa. Are we going to deny that part of our history because some long dead old man called Sir Warren came and drew a line on some piece of paper and called it a boundary?

It is amazing how as Batswana we have the capacity to descend to the very base of arguments when faced with difficult issues. Dickson Lecha's letter to the Attorney General regarding this petty and largely myopic nationalism - jingoism, for short - carries with it injurious insinuations that are also largely self-injury and wanton provocation of a powerful neighbour. Just how do we deal with our collective memory; our history before and after colonialism?

Is it all a heap of dung? If so, why do we use it to validate claims to power? It is difficult to find true friends around the globe? We are a small economy, wit and ingenious flexibility is our only strategy in the endeavour to place our country in global attention. Should we start asking in what hospitals our leaders were delivered? What about those who did not even make it to the hospitals? Those many of our citizens delivered at home or masimo?

And when does one become one of us? Unity Dow has long dispensed with the bigotry of the male. Besides, are we not contradicting ourselves? What do we mean by such notions as freedom of movement of people and goods across SADC? In the globalised world, people will increasingly follow money. Today, unlike before, there is a new kind of Motswana who is also an international citizen. The BDF has taken the lead in producing such international citizens. Take, for example, General Matshenyego Fischer who is now teaching in universities in South Africa; and Major Fred Webb with his engagement in the United Nations peacekeeping forces. All of them really people that this country could not absorb, but people with energy and foresight to make sense of their lives elsewhere.

There are countless nurses and medical doctors the world over who were also ejected by our impervious and grossly patronising administration. Are these not still part of us? Botswana needs to prepare to export knowledgeable people. At the rate at which De Beers, or Debswana, is crushing rock and simultaneously recovering gems from tailings, we cannot be certain how long the diamond glory will last. But someone has muddied our political waters just when arguments were about to begin. Happily, such mudding may also force us to confront issues we would rather have not addressed. For it is important that African intellectuals are honest and avoid the tendency to self-service that is commonplace.

They must explain to the rest of the citizenry that there were proto-nationalist formations before the advent of colonialism and that most of these survived, albeit in deformed permutations, through the period of colonisation. We must face the unhappy fact that our present day nations are creations of colonialism.

Our countries' maps are still the carving lines that Sir Warren drew with the heel of his boot and are arbitrary creations without regard to the cultural boundaries of the communities they mapped.