Our heritge

SANDY GRANT | Thursday July 4, 2013 00:00

All of us will have our stories to tell about this particular cut which lasted for 10 hours in Gaborone and its environs, and was probably also experienced by much of the rest of the country.  Having spent the whole day in Gaborone - being in an out of the large scale History Conference at UB - I give a vote of thanks to the traffic police who presided at all the major junctions through which I had to pass.  The worst possible time for an extended power cut to occur has to be at an end of the month Friday when traffic in Gaborone is always congested. Somehow the traffic police coped throughout the day with this mess.

At most junctions I only caught sight of them out of the corner of an eye and was usually unaware of which stream they were beckoning on and which they were blocking. The only way to deal with the situation seemed to be to follow the car immediately ahead and move when it moved and hope for the best. But I did wonder, when twilight became night, if those traffic police were wearing the luminous jackets which would certainly help to make them more visible?  By now we are all familiar with the stories about the domestic difficulties caused by these cuts but I do dearly hope that one day the newspapers will make it their business to tell us how they most affect other areas of life. For instance, how does a dentist respond when the power goes off and the patient's mouth is wide open and the tooth still half in and half out?  Do both decide to sit it out until the lights come on again? Or do they conclude that the situation is hopeless and that it might be better to try again tomorrow when, who knows, that procedure could be finalised after, of course, another jab or two. But it is not just dentist's patients who are caught with their mouths open. What happens in hospital theatres when the backup generators don't work, or in restaurants or when no one can buy power because the power is off or when lifts stop mid-way and doors won't open.

Bring back the old roundabout/circles, I say! But with a nod in the direction of the proprieties, I have long been wondering why the newspapers have been so fixated by the on and on and on maneuverings to obtain the chairmanship of the BDP.Presumably there has been something I am missing here but I am at a loss to understand why editors would believe that for newspaper buying people who are not members of the BDP, this story would be of even minimal interest? Not one of them I suspect has been able or willing to explain how the general public will be affected should the Chair be taken by X rather than by Y. Will the party be more or less conservative, will it shift to the left or to the right or will it remain exactly the same whoever wins the contest?

But in particular, will the power stay on longer if Y wins or X decides in the end to back Z?  In the end, it has had nothing to do with the availability or otherwise of power, water or jobs - simply who, within the ranks of the ruling elite, is loyal to who, or perhaps might make the better chairperson.  Reference to those who do hold the chair allows me to say how much I enjoyed the welcoming speech given by the Blessed Margaret (Nasha) at last week's Southern Africa Historical Association conference.   She has that ability, unfortunately rare, to speak personally and appropriately without loss of dignity and to pitch her remarks at an appropriate level.If you think that there is in fact nothing unusual about this ability consider the many times that ministers and MPS tell people who have never had much cash in their pockets about budgets totaling all those millions.Is this supposed to have meaning for them? Lastly, and quickly at that, because the power might go off at any moment, I need to make a correction about the remarakable ladies of the Inner Wheel which, I presumed from the numbers attending its recent lunch, had 70 or 80 members. I now learn that the majority had bought tickets for it and that the permanent members number, in fact, just 12. That being the case, I can only marvel even more that those few have been able to achieve so much.