Botswana grapples with embracing IP

RAMPHOLO MOLEFHE | Friday February 1, 2008 00:00

The symposium discussed the very difficult questions of definition and ownership of intellectual property, its teaching, and its bearing on the development process in Botswana and internationally. The acknowledgement was made that the subject is very difficult - steeped in law, economics, morality and even politics - but consensus appeared to be that the Batswana  and the Africans would benefit from early engagement with the subject for the sake of the countrys development. RAMPHOLO MOLEFFHE attended and gleaned some ideas from the two days of discussion. 

A two day seminar held early this week at the University of Botswana library in Gaborone observed a screaming lack of 'awareness of the notion of intellectual property' not only among the unassuming producers of cultural goods such as artists but also among the more privileged sections of society, who run government, the private sector and civil society.

They proved it - with the exception of RIIC, BOCODOL and a handful of others - by their failure to attend.

When reference has been made to intellectual property in 'official circles' it has often been described as an 'intangible'. The assumption is often made that 'it is a new thing in Africa'. And even the more avid advocates for African empowerment will by force of habit place the advent of intellectual property in Greece with Socrates.

Problems are manufactured about how the concept might be translated into Setswana or other African vernacular.

And at the ideological level, it will be argued that intellectual property is - if not a Euro- American idea - a thing of the capitalists.

Perhaps, for the larger society, the ultimate and more urgent questions might be: 'Should not the pedagogy of revolution precede the pedagogy of formal education?'

Placed inside the in neo - liberal concept of 'globalisation', the term 'radical change of mindset' would be more palatable for the frequenters of modern day world conferences and seminars.

The point is, the practitioners in the arts - the musicians, the architects, graphic artists, authors - will have no difficulty in identifying copies of their original works in sound, in images or in the written word.

Ironically, the notion that intellectual property may be 'intangible' runs contrary to the rule that for it to have any economic or moral benefit for the creator or innovator - at least in modern capitalist society - it must manifest itself in some material form such as a written sheet of music, a record, cassette, cd, dvd, vynil or other.

It will be useful to society and to the creator only when it shows itself in that form. The notion that intellectual property - property underlined - is always intangible, is therefore a myth that is pervasively employed by officialdom to mystify the benefit of intellectual property to society, thereby permitting Botswana's cabinet to delay in signing into working law the copyright of 2000.

After all, intellectual property is just stuff of the imagination; very often the work of social misfits who failed to become engineers or astronauts.

Copyright lags behind the IP laws that govern industry because, as Dr Kgomotso Moahi, observed, the western industrialised countries will not do trade with nations of the underdeveloped world without the precondition of an indigenous legal regime that will protect their intellectual property from theft.

And because they may no longer rely on the European conventions framed on the dawn of the Industrial Revolution that introduced mass production to protect French and Italian cheeses and wines the western industrialised countries have now established the World Trade Organisation, which fashioned TRIPS, in order to impose upon the countries from which they source raw materials, a world trade order that makes them perpetual consumers.

The consumers, however, must be deprived of the opportunity to recreate. Otherwise they must be kept so busy with consumption that they should not even think about creating.

The questions of the skeptics who perceive IP as a thing of the industrialised west, find relevance, even as they fall short of raising the opposite question, perhaps because, as one speaker proposed; ideological debate is banned in the conference rooms of the globalised 21st century. There is only one superpower. 'There is only one ideology, trade,' the argument goes.

And so the Africans, define their relationship with the rest of the world in terms of where the United States and Russia - previously the Soviet Union - stand. When one of them collapses, Africa goes with the one that stands. It would appear - and the ideological debate is very much a part of our perception of the economics, politics and culture that surround IP - that Africa, like the Latinos and the Asiatics, suffers historically from deliberate and systematic disenfranchisement and marginalisation in the area of IP.

The discussions at the UN-WIPO symposium reveal that the processes of discovery, invention, development and proliferation of IP, as is discernible in the parallel development of Information Technology or IT - have been dominated by the western industrialised countries, in particular, the United States of America.

That country, as the symposium questions timidly suggested, enjoys an exploitative relationship with the smaller and weaker economies of the underdeveloped world, which manifests itself in modern times through the phenomenon of IT.

The questions about whether the US controls IT to its own advantage seems irrelevant in that regard. The appropriate question becomes: 'How does the underdeveloped world including Botswana and southern Africa fight the larger war against economic domination by the United states and its western allies, on the specific terrain of IT'.

Founder and Dean of the WIPO Worldwide Academy, Mpazi Sinjela, makes the point in more 'ideologically neutral language: 'When the train leaves the train station with the pioneers of IP on board, what do we do? Do we remain on the platform and complain that they have left us behind?' he asks rhetorically. 'Don't you think we would do better by climbing on board to get what we can get for ourselves and our people?' he proposes.

Seemingly, once the Africans have overcome their ideological inhibitions for fear of what more they might lose at the hands of the Americans, they will realise, as one seated at the back of the hall whispered, 'there is nothing new about IP in Africa. For ages, artists and communities have been composing songs and drawing pictures'. 

In the African communities there were skilled craftsmen, who passed skills from one generation to the next along strict lines from father to son or mother to daughter.

There were families who were respected for the skills they possessed in the practice of traditional healing, sculpting, ironsmiths, fishmongers, historians and others.

All of them possessed a vocabulary that named the tools of the trade whilst also describing the process of production.

The fundamental difference in modern times, it would seem, is the system of relations of relations of production that insists on depriving the creator or innovator of the full economic and moral benefits of the products of his physical or intellectual labour, forefeiting them to owners of capital and means of distribution.

RIIC complained about the exploitation of Botswana's 'biochemical resources' by multinational pharmaceutical companies which then take the raw materials abroad for refinement and packaging, for sale at exhorbitant prices to the rest of the world, including the place of origin.

Sinjela announced that an African grouping of IP conscious activists recently notified WIPO that they wanted protection for products of indigenous knowledge related to traditional healing.

The UB-WIPO symposium made proposals for cultivations of IP consciousness:
* The Gaborone International Fair and others should set aside space specifically for the propagation of IP and display of original works and innovations.

* There should be an IP policy
* There should be a deliberate government programme, executed in partnership with the private sector, to promote IP in the rural areas

* There should be IP education for the police, security forces, artists, customs and immigrations officials, educationists, health workers, farmers, people in commerce, non-governmental organisations and politicians

* An IP institute should be established for accreditation of IP practitioners
* Judges and other legal people should be trained in IP and an appropriate court established to deal with cases in intellectual property

* There should be sharing of training resources between IPO training institutions locally, regionally in Africa and internationally to avoid duplication of work and to promote sharing of resources.

* IP should be acknowledged as an area of academic specialization at Masters degree level and not just as a semester course as is the case in most places where the subject is taught

* IP training should start at primary school and be available up to tertiary level education.

* Every country and locality should develop a vocabulary and appropriate teaching methods that communicate the message of intellectual property effectively.

* The country's schools of engineering, in particular UB, should teach their students about IP in order that  they should protect their work, whilst in training and at the workplace.