Frequent, and common experience, especially floods, droughts and other pestilential plagues, teach us we should never allow our consciousness to be invaded, filled, and entirely absorbed by careless and ruinous development projects and social experiments. As a country we’re still in a very fragile waking state, that the relationships that hold us together, the relationships that tie us to the land, are irregular, and inconstant, that the national spirit that has taken hold of us for the last 50 years, can only be sustained to a certain extent, and that beyond a certain measure of proportion what we do with our land may lead to disintegration as well as sustained growth.
But we don’t listen. We prefer to muddle through historical experience without caution. We talk about tomorrow as if it already exists for us, ready-made for more careless use. We forget that tomorrow may never come, that human actions of today may be the ruin of the future. We forget a country, like a house, is a living machine, that it is very easy to reduce it to a dilapidated rusty shell. A country is both a mental and physical idea. The ideas that seize, fix and reshape a country are not always spontaneous productions. No! Building a country demand continuous and deliberate human effort and direction. But in Botswana re nwa magapo, re iketile. We even send people to parliament to play, to have fun. Nobody cares how the country is run. We only care about what it can give to us, now, in gargantuan abundance! We shall live to regret this complacent indifference. Personally, I don’t want to be around when the merry-go-round breaks down. Sadly, I fear my children may be victims to this impending night sun. I put down this record to absolve myself from the charge of ignorance of the reality of my generation and its contemporary world.
