Whither Botswana

DAN MOABI | Friday October 28, 2011 00:00

The National AIDS Council (NAC) - chaired by retired president Festus Mogae - has put a set of challenging recommendations to national institutions for consideration and eventual adoption and implementation.  The process is already underway because earlier this week, a radio news item indicated that the House of Chiefs is already debating the recommendations.  Unsurprisingly, a number of the members of the House expressed outright opposition to the recommendations related to the legalisation of homosexuality and prostitution, and the distribution of condoms in the country's prisons. They rejected these as both unchristian and contrary to Botswana culture.

Despite this discouraging start to the consultation process, I write today (as I have done a few times in the past) to plead with all the authorities concerned - including the House of Chiefs itself, if it is still debating the NAC report - to consider the said recommendations with the seriousness that they clearly deserve. The recommendations deserve to be considered with utmost seriousness because they are a key part of the overall effort of the NAC and the nation as a whole to deal as effectively as possible with what is still a potential threat to the survival of the Botswana nation: the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The pandemic is an enormous consumer of scarce national resources to the detriment of other equally deserving national priorities. Thanks to the untiring efforts of Festus Mogae during his time as president, this country has never had to bear the entire burden of funding its anti-HIV/AIDS programmes. The international community has been of tremendous assistance in this regard, and I have no doubt that our entire nation is most grateful for this generosity. However, we cannot afford to assume that this will always be the case, for that would be unrealistic. And even if the assistance were to continue indefinitely, neither could we assume that it would always be at the same levels of generosity that we have tended to see over the years. It is therefore very prudent of the NAC to be constantly in search of new ways of intensifying its and the nation's war against the pandemic.

Admittedly, the House of Chiefs is not alone in condemning the NAC's latest recommendations on the basis of their being unchristian and contrary to our culture.  Many others have expressed similar sentiments in the media and in private conversations.  Obviously, their objective is to influence the nation and the other institutions that are still to consider the recommendations - notably Parliament and President Ian Khama's cabinet. And they have taken every opportunity to condemn the NAC recommendations in the most emotive terms.  I think University of Botswana academic, Log Raditlhokwa, who has expressed his strong opposition to the recommendations both in writing and on air, is perhaps a good representative of this group as any.

He wrote recently: 'Former president Festus Mogae is rooting for the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the legalisation of prostitution (Monitor 17 October), arguing that the church's way for addressing these social vices doesn't work. But he didn't convince us that Satan's way works!' (Midweek Sun, 19 October 2011). This is typical of others who have criticised Mogae on the basis of their religious beliefs. But if Mogae 'didn't convince us that Satan's way works', as Raditlhokwa and his fellow-Christians have been arguing recently, how can they convince us that the church's way works when, as Mogae rightly argued, it has never worked?  If the church's way has failed to work in the spiritual home of the Catholic church, Italy, as Mogae argued, what hope do Raditlhokwa and others have that it will ever work here? Besides the flourishing of prostitution in Italy, despite the church's way, how come the vast majority of Catholic women everywhere have consistently practised birth control despite their church's stringent rules against it?

The explanation is simply that many of the church's ways are totally unrealistic and irrelevant to the problems of the modern world. So, those who belong to the various religions of the world (and even worship on a regular basis) simply ignore such outdated strictures in the interests of the wellbeing of their families and their nations. That is why we should not allow any group of believers, however large or small, to continue to influence our government to reject (on the basis of outdated spiritual or cultural beliefs) policy proposals that clearly seek to promote the best interests of the Botswana nation. Besides, Botswana is not a Christian or any other religious state. 

It is a secular state, and wisely so!In my view, probably the biggest challenge currently facing our government is to ensure that come 2016, there will be no new HIV infections in our nation.  This is one of the clearest and perhaps most critical of the ambitions embodied in the nation's much-talked-about Vision 2016. We should not aim to, but we could undoubtedly survive as a nation even if we failed to achieve some of the objectives of Vision 2016; but not so regarding the one related to HIV/AIDS. That is the major challenge of the NAC recommendations to the government.