The trick is to be truly apolitical

| Friday November 25, 2011 00:00

 

One of the reasons why big companies take the Babusi Ward Development Committee in Gaborone South seriously is because the committee takes itself seriously.

With a vision document, bank account, catchy logo, sub-committees, a stable of expert advisors and plans to have a website, this committee is one of a kind. When the Babusi WDC has gone to organisations like the Botswana Development Corporation, Motor Vehicle Assurance, Rural Industries Innovation Centre (RIIC) and Golden Fruits to ask for money, it hasn't come back empty handed.

Last year, it threw a Christmas party for elderly people in the ward - it actually has an Elders Sub-committee and makes the most of the institutional memory of the elderly. Next month, the committee will launch a DVD about the ward and, at the same event, will donate a plasma TV to Extension 14 clinic.

'People have to wait in line for a long time before they get to the consultation room. While they wait, they will be watching TV to while away time,' explains Mosimanegape Morapedi, the chairperson of the committee.

The shooting of the DVD, which is being done by a ward resident, was still in progress at the time of the interview.

Morapedi says some of the subjects who were interviewed for the DVD are elderly people who are well-versed in the history of Babusi ward.

'This DVD will serve as a permanent record of that history,' he adds.

Not too long ago, noted public intellectual Log Raditlhokwa was on a Btv talk show talking about why it was important for village development committees (or ward development committees, as they are called in cities and towns) to avail themselves of free professional expertise of civic-minded members of the community. It turns out that he is actually walking his talk.

What Raditlhokwa did not mention on the show, which Morapedi does during the interview, is that the University of Botswana lecturer is one of their expert advisers. Loago Raditedu, head of the Botswana Exporters Association, is another. It has somehow happened that the VDC or WDC often becomes the piggy bank of some unscrupulous members. From what Morapedi says, that appears to have been the case with some members of the previous committee.

'When we took over, about P11,000 was missing and could not be accounted for. We had meetings with the culprits and asked them to return the money. We didn't encounter any resistance from them because they knew they had broken the law. Finally we agreed on a reimbursement plan through which we were able to recover all that money,' he reveals.

Besides the money issue, development committees are sometimes ineffectual because they are susceptible to the force of political undercurrents. Officially, these committees are apolitical, but in reality they are a hotbed of party politics. Just two months ago, a scuffle broke out at a village in the Mahalapye sub-district at a Kgotla meeting that was called to elect a new VDC. The combatants were a sitting Botswana National Front councillor and a Botswana Democratic Party activist he defeated in the 2009 general elections.

Fearful of the malignant influence of partisanship, Morapedi says when his committee took office in November 2009, it took a conscious decision to steer clear of party politics.

'In the previous committee, there were factions that were a result of political allegiance. As you can tell, that situation was far from ideal because political interests were placed before those of the community. The committee that I am chairman of has members who are politically aligned, but I have made it very clear that we must separate committee work from politics,' says Morapedi who, by his account, is not aligned to any party.

However, how brightly the Babusi WDC can shine depends to a large extent on the power-generation capacity of structures it is plugged into. Unfortunately, some of them are prone to interminable periods of load-shedding.

Morapedi laments poor turn-out at public meetings the committee calls despite efforts it makes to publicise them.

'The only time that residents know there is a ward development committee is when they have personal problems,' he says.

One such relates to tenancy at Self-Help Housing Agency (SHHA) houses where slum landlords reign with both terror and impunity and don't accord tenants 'the right to live in security, peace and dignity' as the World Health Organisation recommends. While a tenant at a corporate housing complex never has to worry about issues such as legal security of tenure, habitability of house and arbitrary interference with his/her privacy, that is what one too many SHHA house tenants have to live with on a daily basis.

One SHHA house tenant alleges that the sole reason he was kicked out of a poorly maintained one-room house he rented in Gaborone West was because he brought home a 'girl' who, by the way, happened to be carrying his child. From the main house, the landlady, a fearsome elderly woman, had espied upon the couple coming in and going into the match-box backroom the man rented. Before they could settle in, she was already at the door pounding on it with a stick and reading him the riot act.

'You know the rules. You can't bring a girl in here!' he remembers the landlady shouting from the other side of the door. Subsequently, he was given an eviction notice minus a refund of the rent which, as is standard practice, he had paid a month in advance.

The landlady promised to reimburse him at the end of the month but that never happened. Once when she had called to carry out a clandestine inspection, she noticed that the refrigerator was on and upbraided him for running up the electricity bill.

'I paid P150 for the electricity alone but used very little of it because I was rarely at that house. She also didn't allow tenants to park their cars inside the yard,' says the tenant, adding that he knows of even more extreme cases where landlords would not rent houses to prospective tenants with babies.

Morapedi's committee has to deal with a plethora of cases such as this one.

However, all too often, it finds itself helpless mainly because the Gaborone City Council, as indeed all other local authorities in the country, does not have laws that protect the rights of tenants in SHHA areas. 'The main problem seems to be that there are no lease agreements to begin with, and that gives landlords an opportunity to abuse tenants,' Morapedi says.

Keeping the ward clean is another problem that the committee cannot deal with effectively because the government chose the wrong colour of scorpions to do the job. Former Gaborone mayor, Harry Mothei, was only half joking when he said Green Scorpions (environmental police officers employed by local authorities) coming upon an elderly man urinating in the street were more likely to comply with the offender's 'monna look away!' command than arrest him. Morapedi uses a different set of words to essentially make the point that Green Scorpions would be taken much more seriously if the government took these police officers seriously enough to give them adequate powers to enforce environmental law.

To an extent, having its councillor, Haskins Nkayigwa, as the Mayor of Gaborone may help the Babusi WDC deliver on its development programme.