According to the officials at the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, it has been discovered that these erstwhile Batswana are of foreign parentage - at least partly, leaving them in limbo. Not that the officials always knew about these aliens who have all along apparently masqueraded as Batswana before they came looking for new passports. No. But what does it matter? The irony is how a Motswana who was born here of a Motswana parent, has lived in Botswana for the last 20 years or more, has the ultimate mark of Motswana in the Omang Card, has voted in elections all his/her life and has never lived in his other parent's country suddenly become a foreigner!
The law states that if you have a parent - or even a grandparent, for that matter - who is citizen of another country, upon turning 21, you must renounce the parent's citizenship that accrues to you by descent, if you should want to remain a Motswana. However, the tragedy is that many such people only discover this when they approach Immigration to renew their passports. To make matters worse, the officials who are supposed to implement this strange citizenship law seem to be in the dark regarding how it is to be applied. How else do you explain a situation where siblings have different citizenships? Or, as has happened, one half of twins is a citizen, the other half has to apply to become a citizen, while both their parents are citizens? The bottom line is that like many other nations, we are nation of immigrants. Only a handful of us can claim to be true blue Batswana without a fraction of foreign parentage, either at the level of nuclear family or through grandparents. Our immigration policy, which is largely a product of apartheid era paranoia when foreigners were viewed with suspicion, has become an impediment to our needs. From the very beginning, the policy did not work for a territory that, being a product of the Berlin Conference of 1884 that formalised the Scramble for Africa, was carved out of the central African plateau without regard to the ethnic spread of people across what is now Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia and South Africa.
