While certain politicians have been quick to claim credit for the re-hiring of the workers, the Office of the President (OP) gave them a rude awakening with a statement last week to the effect that their involvement in the matter has been peripheral. The people who hire, re-hire, retire and sack civil servants are known. The rest of us can only plead for their indulgence, unless we approach a court of law to compel such people to do what we want. That is why the sideshow over who is responsible for the re-employment or re-instatement of the sacked workers makes strange reading. The politicians and quislings have done their part in beseeching whoever is responsible for the re-engagement to act.
But whoever is supposed to act says the process has been going on and that politicians are meddling in matters that they know little about. So whether it is true or not that politicians have been grovelling and prostrating themselves before President Ian Khama for the re-employment of the sacked workers, the final decision lies elsewhere. With or without the politicians' appeals, the government can still re-hire the sacked workers. The politicians have held meetings with Khama during which they presumably begged or requested the President to pardon and re-instate the workers. Soon after it became public that some workers had been re-engaged, politicians lost no time before taking credit only for the OP to denounce them. Whatever the case, some people may be economical with the truth or are trying to reap where they did not sow. Unless Khama told these politicians in their meetings that after listening to their requests, the government had decided to re-hire workers, then they have no right to claim some credit for coming to the rescue of the jobless. If this is the case, then the OP must be condemned for denying politicians one of the things they crave for most - credit and the accompanying publicity. But if Khama made no undertaking that government would re-hire on the request of the politicians he met, then it is business as usual. Politicians are trying to reap where they did not sow. By the way, a number of politicians met Khama on separate occasions. We wonder at what point they all decided that their intercession on behalf of the workers had worked.
