Remembering Jacob Sello Selebi

Jackie Slebi
Jackie Slebi

Former South African National Police Commissioner, Jackie Sello Selebi was buried in Pretoria over the weekend. I first met Selebi in 1989. If you think about it, that was the year when international relations were profoundly redefined since the end of World War II in 1945.

It was in 1989 that the Soviet Union broke up.The Berlin Wall, which separated the former West Germany from East Germany, also collapsed that year. That was also the year in which the cold war ended. And it was largely as a result of the events of this watershed year that Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 leading to the subsequent demise of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994.

In 1989 Selebi was in Gaborone to attend a meeting between the ANC Youth League and the Youth League of the then ruling National Party. The ANC at the time was banned in South Africa, and hence the meeting was held in a neutral venue, Botswana. The meeting followed a series of others held between various white South African organisations with the ANC in exile. The first such meeting was held in 1987 in Dakar, Senegal between the ANC and leading white politicians, academics and businessmen.

Editor's Comment
Gov’t, Balete should bury the hatchet

The acrimony that seemingly characterised the relationship between the Malete Land Board on behalf of the Botswana government and Kgosi Mosadi Seboko and the tribe, should now be water under the bridge as the tribe has finally gotten what it has been fighting for - the land.Kgosi Mosadi has articulated an instance upon which she was allegedly summoned to the State House by the Head of State, Mokgweetsi Masisi where the former claimed she was...

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