Almost all the stalls had given a day off to their workers and those who went to the mall to get their coffee fix at the Diamond Square were left both disappointed and amazed. Obviously such huge events must have a fair dose of controversy for them to get the right level of publicity though this is not the official position. The PR teams usually have their hands full trying to close all the avenues of controversy but the Controversy Factories keep replacing their blades with even sharper blades every year. This year’s controversy was provided by the inclusion of one artist from Nigeria called Davido. He managed to push up the Anger Metre into the red zone for a great number of locals who felt that there’s enough local talent that should have won the contract to serenade people during the summit. These are the very same people that also feel other countries are not receptive to Botswana talent. But truth is things don’t usually work that way. Any local event must be headlined by an artist who is not local. That seems the showbiz template in Africa. Imagine going to a show and you find your cousin headlining a show - the very cousin who needed a ride to get to the show in the first place.
This year’s theme went something like: The Entrepreneurial Spirit. For the longest time government has been trying to push down this spirit down many a citizen’s throat. This has proved tougher than arguing with a woman – which is the toughest task known to males. The hope is that the theme is the proverbial boot that will open the door to enterprise. Apparently most of our people are stuck in the phase of tenderpreneurship. Tenderpreneurship is a millennial word that has just waded into dictionaries and Thesauruses in recent times but to cut a long story (or word) short, it is where people use political connections to secure government contracts and proceed to botch them up. This is hardly sustainable because those that don’t win take government to courts and judges are known to chastise government in normal countries. Tenderpreneurship, like all viruses, keeps mutating and now there’s a fresher type called corrupreneurs. This one has not made it into any dictionary and the virus has the experts at sixes and sevens. The Ink Spills Dictionary of Millennial English defines this as pseudo tenderpreneurs who win contracts by bribing anything that moves.
