There have been major recent changes in the landscape of the diamond industry and reports of disaffection and unease in Debswana as a result of re-structuring programmes. There has been the further unrolling of the Zimbabwe tragedy. All of these events and changes are intertwined.
In past years there has been occasional comment to the effect that, as far as its democratic structures and interests were concerned, the electorate in this country was educated and critically alert. Rather obviously, it was nothing of the kind. It was extremely complacent. It was also quite content that the government should take the really important decisions sometimes without even being aware that there may have been alternative and perhaps better choices available. There was much about those times, however, which was appealing and sometimes remarkably innocent. Seretse used to wander into the Book Centre to look for cowboy paper books without armed security personnel first checking the building and then standing at his elbow. Both he and Masire taught voluntarily at the Capital Continuation Classes in Gaborone. Minister Nwako came into a conference on rural development and accepted the offer of a friend at the back to share his chair, each having one bum on and one bum off. But that has all noticeably changed. Take privatisation for instance. This was a term which was never heard in the 60s and 70s perhaps because there was nothing to privatise. Recently it has come into common usage but as a topic it has generated little public interest. No one could have predicted, however, that the planned privatisation of one parastatal, Air Botswana, could have prompted what looks like a high profile stand off between Parliament and the cabinet, certainly between the former and the relevant Minister. In one sense this surprising spectacle has distracted public attention from the issue of procedures and requirements. For whatever reason and this must eventually be made known - these were not scrupulously observed. It follows therefore that there should be no cause for disagreement between Cabinet and Parliament. If there is, it becomes exceptionally interesting - because what could those reasons be?
If privatisation, first time around, could have generated such enormous problems, it can be assumed that almost every major public need is now likely to involve difficulties of one kind or another. Yesterday, when it was poor, this country had a special police unit but no army. Now that it is rich, it not only has an army but is about to invest heavily in an additional intelligence and security agency. Major proposals of this kind need to be publicly understood and debated. Tourism, for instance, may be the country's major development priority but the odds are that it already spends far more on defence than it does in attracting foreign visitors. Should it perhaps be the other way around? Yes, everything has become so much more complicated for everyone and so much more difficult to understand so that what we need now is an Institute which will enable us to grasp what happens when a very poor country becomes a very rich one, to know how its new found wealth is channelled and controlled, and to identify precisely the points at which wealth is liable to threaten if not pervert. In sum, we need to reappraise. For both good and bad, what have diamonds done to and for the people of this country and to and for its systems of government?
