Open letter to AG

MD Lecha | Friday May 14, 2010 00:00

The emerging social and political relationships naturally affect the mode and processes of their regulation within the nation. More specifically are the mushrooming of political parties in the country that force Batswana to make informed decisions about who qualifies and who to trust for what positions of leadership. Please respond as you would to questions on factual evidence and truth and not as one would fashion a response, a rationalisation to be read in Parliament as is customarily the case.

Particular to the new political party of Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD), it is important that the Attorney General should satisfy the nation that all their national leaders have the legal bonafides to assume and act in their respective roles.

Our main contention here is the leadership of BMD especially as regarding one of its founding members, Sidney Pilane.

We would like to be clear from the Attorney General the extent to which Pilane is qualified to positions of leadership in Botswana in the light of the following:

1. While countries like South Africa do allow and practice relations of dual citizenship, such is not the case in Botswana; where to be a citizen of Botswana, one may not be a citizen of any other state. To the same end we would like to know from the Attorney General whether Sidney Pilane is a regular (or has regularised as) Botswana citizen.

2. Somewhere around the close of the 1990s Pilane had renounced his citizenship of Botswana to adopt a South African citizenship. And here we request the Attorney General to furnish the details of month and year when Pilane renounced Botswana citizenship and the same details for when he renounced South African citizenship to revert back to Botswana if at all he has reverted to being a citizen of Botswana.  And these details should be fairly easy to furnish from his South African citizenship documents to be destroyed, as well from information that would have been published in the Government Gazette as stipulated by Botswana Laws when Pilane applied for naturalisation in Botswana, if he did naturalise.

3. Around the same time that he adopted South African citizenship, Pilane understandably also had changed his names so that he was known by different names in South Africa other than Sidney Pilane. We also therefore seek from the AG to satisfy us Batswana in detail that the processes of name change have also been adhered to according to the demands of our Laws of Botswana. This too would be easy to provide to Batswana from the Government Gazette of the time.

4. Botswana does not have a facility  to practice law as an advocate, except when such professionals are imported from outside the country through a process of applying for a temporary practice permit in the country. From the AG we therefore need to know through what instrument of law Pilane is registered to practice as an advocate in Botswana, and how the permit is renewable at what intervals?

5. At the time Pilane left the country for South Africa he had been practising law as an attorney in Botswana. Now we would like to know if at the end of the legal year in question Pilane had availed his Law Books for auditing in order to qualify for a new practicing licence or merely to set his books in order to the satisfaction of his erstwhile clients? Batswana need to know through a detailed documentation from the AG whether such books had been regularised.

It is imperative that Batswana know their leaders and about them so that they may make informed decisions over who should play what role based on their well known aptitude of character. And it will serve the people well when the Attorney General's Chambers treated this matter as an urgent national appeal.  Rene Descartes says: 'Those who make it their business to set precepts for others, must subject themselves to the greatest censure if they should err in the slightest particular'. In Setswana, it should caution: 'se ya bogwe se tletse se bo se bowe se tletse'. Lefatshe leno la rona...