GSS grounds a symbol of unity

GOTHATAONE MOENG
Staff Writer | Friday June 17, 2011 00:00

One, two, three passers-by walk across the grounds, solitary across the vast red dust.   It is business as usual once again at the Gaborone Secondary School sports and recreational grounds. One would be hard-pressed, looking at the grounds today, to believe that just days ago the grounds were home to an eight-week long 'mother of all strikes' by public service workers. 

The only sign now is that the grounds have been newly graded and smoothed over, as if to get rid of any traces or reminders of the hundreds of disgruntled workers who made the grounds their second home in their quest to convince the government to give them a 16 percent salary increment.

This past Monday, despite the official suspension of the strike by the Botswana Federation of Public Service Unions (BOFEPUSU) leaders, some workers were only induced to disperse from the GSS grounds by the threat of use of force by police officers. 

The question that some have been asking themselves is why, after two months of being at the mercy of the tempestuous weather and of not being paid, those workers would still cling to the uncertainty of the industrial action.

But rather than the obstinacy and the eagerness for radicalism that some may suspect, the workers may have been clinging to the atmosphere that the strike had bred, and that GSS grounds encapsulated perfectly. 

For, in the eight weeks of the strike the workers, along with many Batswana who did not participate, had shed the coat of despondency that Batswana are often accused of by standing up for an issue they believed in. 

For once, workers had come together to take their leadership to task, and were steadfast in their belief, matching every blow dealt to them with another. In that journey, the GSS grounds had become like a nurturing mother, drawing everybody to her bosom: from the ordinary cleaner, to the lawyers, to the specialised doctors, all came to meet at the grounds.  

Political bigwigs - both from the opposition and from the ruling party came to hear the workers' grievances and to throw in their words of encouragement.  Even political aspirants, like student representatives from tertiary institutions came to let their parents know that they sympathised with them. Just hours after the workers congregated at the grounds on the first day of the strike, vendors abandoned their usual posts of business and laid claim to pieces of the ground, with their stalls selling everything from watermelon to airtime units, makeshift tables and vans from where bundles of sweet reed protruded sat side-by-side. 

Shifty intelligence officers mingled with the workers, innocent questions on their lips.  Journalists, in their relentless search for news and under pressure from looming deadlines, made the daily pilgrimage to the grounds to ferret out new angles and developments. In the final days, police officers in their anti-riot helmets and shields, and their armoured vehicles were a daily sight, lending a menacing air to the grounds.

The GSS grounds had shed their forlorn look, and had become a meeting-place whose vibrancy was palpable. Cars lined up on more than half of the grounds, leaving the rest of the space for the workers and the vendors.

Colourful umbrellas had sprouted up, and camp chairs and cheap plastic stools from Chinese shops littered the place.

Friends met friends there, colleagues who had not seen each other in a long time met and reconnected there. The grounds were never quiet. If leaders were not addressing the workers, music played out of the loudspeakers.  

The workers themselves kept up their spirits with incessant singing of newly-styled protest songs, which lampooned everybody from the director of department of public service management to the minister of finance to the president. Within days of congregating there, workers formed choirs that kept the sitting crowds entertained, and composed new songs everyday with which the workers were able to get their own back on their leaders.

The strike was nationwide, and there were protesters in almost all the big towns and villages around the country, but they all kept a keen ear attuned to the demonstrations in Gaborone. Protesters in towns closest to Gaborone gravitated to the GSS grounds. 

As weeks turned into a month, the number of workers congregating at the grounds, dwindled, but still a steadfast crowd continued turning up day after day, as if to hold on to the initial daring and righteousness, that turned to outrage that turned to disappointment and an obstinate hope that had kept them at the grounds. 

They kept coming until the Monday that Botswana police officers unfurled a red flag that made it clear that the workers would be shot if they refused to disperse.  And so they did. Already, the grounds have been relegated to a shortcut as people criss-cross from neighbouring places to the Main Mall or the University of Botswana.

Pedestrians make solitary figures as they walk across the grounds, on the ground that has been newly smoothed and graded as if to flatten out memories of the workers who dared to make a stand. 

Now all that remains at the grounds, are random learner drivers making their cautious way around, and the stray papers trapped in the grass.