This is confirmed by the alacrity with which our so-called political leaders compare Botswana with failed African countries. Yet we are expected - in six months' time - to commemorate and celebrate 47 years of our country's Independence from British colonial rule. And what do we have to show for it? An abyss of doom and gloom in the place of what was once projected as a shining example of democracy and a beacon of hope in the continent of Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness.
The tragedy of Botswana is that even at the best of times, the country was always a pretender to grandeur that shone only because it was surrounded by polecat states that were bound to be spurned even by the most fascist of their supporters. The sorrow of our country is that it has always promoted mediocrity, in the workplace and in setting up goals, while pretending to be a meritocracy that it might truly have been. The calamity is that while the author of Darkness At Noon might have intended his admittedly mournful work to be a figurative warning of dire consequences of the mismanagement and corruption that proceeds from his view of humanity as a hopelessly short-circuited invention, we took a literalist interpretation of it.
