Ndaba's burden

| Friday November 26, 2010 00:00

 

Ndaba Gaolathe and his fellow Tirelo Sechaba participants, young boys still in their teens, came out. But the old man was wrong, the buffalo was not dead.

Pandemonium. Buffalo charges. Men and boys flee. Boys make for the same tree. At the trunk, a small chaotic knot of boys trying to climb over each other forms. Ndaba must find other means. Leaning branches grabbed and mounted as a short cut. 'It got crowded at the tree trunk. Ka palama setlhare ka dikala,' recalls Ndaba laughing.

'Ndaba and others had to climb the leaning thorny tree (mosu) from the branches because some of us were crowding the stem on our way up the tree. We had to run for our lives, that's when about five of us went for the same tree,' recalls Phillip Kalanke, Ndaba's fellow Tirelo Sechaba participant, who was also involved in that near tragedy.

 This is one of the stories that still brings chills down Mma Gaolathe's spine. 'I hated Tirelo Sechaba. I thought my little boy was going to be sent out there to be eaten by wild animals.'

She pauses, looking in the far distance. A smile covers her face. 'Aah, but my friend loved it. He thought it was a necessary journey for the children,' she adds. Mma Gaolathe always refers to her husband as 'friend', but says it with such a fond smile that it cannot be an ordinary friend being referred to.

Tirelo Sechaba was never an easy proposition to the elites who did not like their children, merely teenagers, to be exposed to the deprivations of rural life for a year often in the nether areas of the country in the name of national service.

While Mma Gaolathe had nightmares at the thought of her youngest boy in the middle of nowhere, Ndaba's father, Baledzi Gaolathe, a senior figure in the government, would have never tried to use his influence to get his son a more comfortable placement. Not that the younger Ndaba would have wanted it either.

Once again, son and father were in agreement. Afterall, who could pass up an opportunity to live among ordinary Batswana?

Ordinary people hold a very special place in the Gaolathe world. As if they want to hold on to their peasant background, the Gaolathe self-image is centred around ordinary Batswana. However, even more importantly, at least when one looks at Ndaba and his father Baledzi, within the Gaolathe psyche seems to be a desire to serve the ordinary person - seeing the world through their eyes, and where possible, living their lives. At the heart of the Gaolathe agenda lies the ordinary folk.

Names may be equal, but others are more equal than others. And in that pantheon of name-giving, there is no name bigger, more royal and perhaps even more meaningful than that assigned a man by his mother. Every mother has a nickname for her son. Ndaba Gaolathe's is usketsi, more like 'sgegi' in that Xhosa-influenced accent. 

'Usgegi...?' Mma Gaolathe says, a bit doubtful. She squints for a second. Her finger points at a little boy in a black and white picture. An old print taken some time in the dusty and somewhat decrepit landscape of 1960s Botswana. The boy holds onto someone's finger, someone older, off-frame, and seems to be trying to escape the glare of the lens.

'Yes...this is usgegi here,' she says, more assuredly. A spark lights up in her eyes.

We are inside the backroom in the Gaolathe house in Extension 9, just behind Princess Marina Hospital that is still going through transformation into a family office. Mma Gaolathe, or more formally Isabella Nomazizi Zelphah Gaolathe, has a frailness born of the passage of time and life's endless challenges.

But even Mma Gaolathe cannot help but be nostalgic about all things 'ordinary.' Mma Gaolathe likes to talk about the past. However, when one listens closely, it is what the past represents to her that seems to resonate more - times when relations between people were simpler and even more rewarding; when people had a sense of who they were and things were what they were.

Back then when her children walked to school. For a moment, she seems lost in a trance.

Ndaba has a slim frame. He wears thin-rimmed glasses, a black suit and a white shirt. He is a young urbane version of his famous father. And thus, in a way, he looks as though he will soon open his black briefcase and read the national budget speech from there in a deliberate, if slightly stuttering, heavily Kalanga-accented fashion.

He sits down, in his arm a briefcase and in the other a copy of Business Day. It is lunchtime in the Kgale View shopping complex in Gaborone and there is a hustle and bustle of shoppers and businesspeople looking for lunch.

The smell of coffee is in the air. The high roof of the Game City Complex, almost industrial in design, amplifies the clink of glasses, the voices of the waiters taking orders, the soft music being piped in from somewhere down there, and Ndaba speaks in the lowest of tones possible so that his voice threatens to be drowned out by the waitresses at Mugg & Bean. He leans forward and tells the story of his time at Tirelo Sechaba.

He recalls one of the most important events in 1990 in his yearlong stint at the village of Tsau. The young TS participants mounted a court of injustice against community leaders. No more than 20-year olds themselves, the young men and women prosecuted the village's leaders for sins ranging from failure to produce first class students at the primary school to failure to build fences around their masimo. Villagers congregated at the kgotla from around the village and the surrounding cattle posts, some travelling from afar on foot, to come and bear witness to impunity being nipped in the bud.

Ndaba, the prosecutor, won the case as the community elders were found guilty. 'The elders took it very seriously.

When it was done, ba ne ba itumetse, ba re 'ngwana yole o re bolokile,'' he remembers with a smile. Ndaba often tells these tales where ordinary people get justice, where the marginalised get one over their oppressors, where those at the bottom of the socio-economic pile lead a better existence. Therein lies the quintessence of the Gaolathe philosophy - the interest in, even obsession with, the ordinary person.

If there was a man who came to embody this struggle, to remain relevant to the interests of the ordinary person despite his own social-economic class and to look at life and live it through the experience of an ordinary person, it was Baledzi Gaolathe.

When Ndaba speaks about Baledzi, it is with an admiration beyond that of a son for a father. Baledzi looms large in Ndaba's world, as if the young man would have achieved his dream if he could become half the man his father was.

'Consistently so during his life, Baledzi represented the finest of the human race. His genuine and deep humility touched those who came into contact with him. This tall and slender man refused favours, no matter how much others believed he may have deserved them. He queued at the bank and at the bus rank,' Ndaba said, when he addressed his father for the last time at the old man's funeral.

In Gaolathe's humility and refusal to be given preferential treatment lay a deep fellowship with those who could not be awarded the favours he was offered. There are a number of stories about Baledzi and his humility; his obsession with equal opportunity regardless of social standing that he often attempted to implement this even within his family.

There are those who believe that Baledzi, born into peasantry, never really moved out of the background but rather imbibed the characteristics of the new elites in small doses so that he remained at heart a peasant: The humility. The compassion. Above all, the rejection of the trappings of materialism.

Baledzi was born in Nkange, about 100kms west of Francistown, on March 4, 1942. The Gaolathe household like many rural Batswana in those times, and even today, dedicated their efforts to subsistence agriculture. In Changate, a village 10kms from Nkange, it was a life that required manual work - de-horning cattle, herding livestock, castrating young calves, feeding livestock, and helping around the household with other chores when required. It is not so much that you had to love hard work, but rather that there was nothing else to live by. In that existence, families learned to live side by side, brought together by their collective struggle to eke out a living off the land. But though it was a life of hard work, but it was happy life.

Baledzi started his primary school education in 1952 in Changate. However, he could not remain in the small village for long, given the lack of a higher primary school there. In 1955, he had to leave for Maitengwe, moving to Maun in 1957 and finally to Francistown, where he acquired his Standard Six School Leaving Certificate in 1958.

In 1959 Baledzi, enrolled at Moeng College for his secondary school education where he completed the Cambridge Overseas School Leaving Certificate in 1963.

In the pre-independence era, just a couple of years before Botswana gained freedom from Britain, Baledzi left for the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (UBLS) where he obtained a BSc degree, with a Concurrent Certificate in Education in 1967. His focus had been in Mathematics and he still harboured ambitions of pursuing the discipline in the future.

Returning from Lesotho in 1967, Gaolathe was among the first educated Batswana in the newly independent country and was thus poised to assume a position within the new civil service, and in turn a quick march into middle class life.

Mma Gaolathe, however, says that was the most challenging period in their lives. The two had met at university and had assumed that Mma Gaolathe, a South African citizen, would be allowed into Botswana. They got the shock of their lives when immigration officers would have none of it; they were separated at the border.

'He had to leave me there because he could not help me. I had to decide what to do to cross over,' she explains, her eyes lighting up.  While she was at the border considering her limited options, she met another Xhosa girl.

'She explained that you could walk a distance and cross the fence,' she recalls.

Out of the sight of the immigration officers, the young Mma Gaolathe embarked on an epic journey through the bush, eventually crossing into Botswana by sunset.

'At that time, people did not understand English. But using sign language, I got directions from people. I hitched a train all the way to Francistown.'

She got assistance, directions and moral support on that journey from strangers. She says when she got to Francistown she found Baledzi at an old shop, Balsher's, where he worked as a labourer, having rejected the government's offer to join the teaching service.

Having differed with government over where he would be placed in the civil service, Baledzi was prepared to go back to live among the people. As a labourer! And on that day, Mma Gaolathe found him with mealie meal powder all over his face, lifting bags from a truck to the backyard.

'I found him white with mealie meal. He was working unloading mealie meal from trucks,' she says, smiling proudly.

No-one has ever really corroborated this version, but it would seem Baledzi had differences with the government - they wanted him to become a teacher while he preferred to move towards finance. And in that tussle, he was prepared to give up everything, including a better lifestyle as a civil servant, to defend his choice. Afterall, in the Baledzi logic, it was not really any fall from grace to be among ordinary people doing the hard work of unloading mealie meal bags.

Mma Gaolathe says at this point, the government was offering to give Baledzi more perks with the position. 'They said they would give him better conditions and a better salary than other officers in the same position, but...' she says, shaking her head as if the offer was hers to consider. 'But not my friend ... he refused. He said he could not accept to be favoured over others who had put in the hard work over the years!'

If there is any episode that illustrates the Gaolathe over-riding sense of justice, it is this. In the self-interested logic of modernist Botswana, such thinking would be scoffed at as foolishness - this desire to be fair to everyone to the point of even compromising one's own interests.

But before long, Baledzi had to head to the capital town to join the frenetic attempt by his generation to not just take over from the departing foreign legion of civil servants but to concoct, out of the messy colonial system, an independent and functioning government. He was placed at the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Water Affairs in 1968 as Assistant Secretary, while Mma Gaolathe was engaged at the Ministry of Finance as a secretary. Two years later, Baledzi was promoted to the position of Under Secretary in the newly formed Ministry of Mineral Resources and Water Affairs.

Ndaba says he always felt Baledzi was focused on working in the civil service because he believed that that was the position where he could have the biggest impact on the largest number of Batswana. The civil service in practice was central to the development of the country, and given the lack of development in the country then, Baledzi was not wrong to hold that to serve Batswana, one had to work within the civil service.

'My dad believed that working for the country entailed working for the government,' says Ndaba.  The primary concern of the post-independence government was to deliver basic services to the majority of the population.

Schools needed teachers, dams needed engineers, roads needed designers. In 1966, there were 2,175 civil servants, which rose to 6,317 by 1975. The discovery of diamonds meant that there were more funds at the disposal of the government, while generally the country remained undeveloped. Botswana engaged in a major programme to develop infrastructure.

Gaolathe enjoyed his position, which allowed him to influence policy in the most important sectors of water and minerals.

'He remained in that ministry for four years and helped to lay a firm foundation in mineral and water development policies,' explains the minister's official biography.

Speaking to Africa Forum's Reuben Abati in 2000, the man under whom Gaolathe later worked, President Ketumile Masire, explained the fundamental structure of Botswana's early rise from a poor country to a middle-income country: 'And we used the resources of the country for the benefit of all members of the Botswana society.

'Everybody felt we were doing the best we could for his personal needs. We also did careful planning and (with) the implementation of those plans. We set ourselves strict rules. For instance, it doesn't matter how important a project may seem, it cannot be implemented unless it is first of all incorporated into the national development plan. Therefore, we were working to plan all the time and of course we also later in life discovered diamonds which oiled the engine of development.'

The effect of diamonds and the prudent management of revenue from the diamond industry did have a dramatic effect on the majority of Batswana.

The Ministry of Finance and Development Planning under Masire, and later under vice-president Peter Mmusi, Festus Mogae and Gaolathe, was the nerve centre of the development programme. In 1976, when Gaolathe became the permanent secretary in the ministry, he reached the goal of his life - the position awarded him the most influence in the management of the economic growth of the country. He was PS for 16 years, literally running a ministry that among others 'coordinated national development planning, mobilised and prudently managed available financial and economic resources. Further to that, the ministry was responsible for the formulation of economic and financial policies for sustainable economic development.'

In the 1970s and 80s, Botswana witnessed renewed development, particularly the attempts to bring the effects of new government revenue to the ordinary citizen through development in education, health facilities, social services and transport and communications. Critics of the ruling party often blame it for an obsession with the arid and desolate past rather than a focus on improving the future. However, even the most extreme critic cannot ignore the rapid development in the most critical areas of education, health and water infrastructure that followed not just independence but most critically the discovery of diamonds.

Education experts Margaret Keitheile and Masego Mokubung, writing in 2005, explored the progress in the area of education. They found that while in 1986, just over 90 percent of school age children were in school, by 1996 that figure had reached 96 percent.

'Great progress has been made and it was anticipated that all children would be enrolled in school by the year 2002. Due to the critical shortage of well-trained workers to staff the public service, education was given the highest priority in the allocation of resources,' explained the scholars. Gaolathe played no small part in the Botswana of the 80s to 90s.

However, in the 80s and 90s, it became increasingly lucrative for senior civil servants to leave the civil service to join the corporate sector. His contemporaries went into the corporate sector and became successful, establishing some of the first major citizen-owned companies with such success.  Veteran journalist and Mmegi Copy Editor Douglas Tsiako says to be understood, Gaolathe has to be put into a proper context.

'You have to understand the political and even economic landscape of the time. Civil servants were the first to know what opportunities for wealth were coming, especially as more private interests came into the country. And because hardly anyone was watching, people in such positions could loot as they pleased. We 'commies' were outnumbered and too far from the pot of gold to matter, anyway.

'Besides, 'commies' were too busy putting out fires whenever the Cold War burst out hot or watching the blooming Boers down south. Baledzi could have simply left the civil service and become an early compradore by going into partnerships with foreign investors to fleece ordinary Batswana. Many of his friends and contemporaries did. Not him. Alternatively, he could have stayed there to co-ordinate the taking over of the state and state resources by vested interests at a fee. There is little evidence he did that,' Tsiako says. He adds that Gaolathe remained one of few dedicated civil servants who worked their way up to the most senior positions in government and remained there. Baledzi, he says, was an idealist in his dedication to the civil service. 'I saw him as an old fashioned truly public spirited civil servant who saw working for the public sector as part of his service to the nation.'

Said Ndaba in his lyrical ode to his father: 'He possessed an insatiable appetite to serve, to work for his people and his family. His endurance inspired him, upon return from a trip abroad, to drive directly from the airport to work or to meetings until late at night.' continues next week