BLACK WOMAN, YOU ARE ALSO ON YOUR OWN

One of Steve Biko’s best remembered quotes is “Black man, you are on your own”. We want to make Biko’s message more gender- inclusive by expanding it to: “Black woman, you are also on your own”.

We say this on the experience of a woman who until June 3, 2021, worked at the Gantsi District Commissioner’s Office as a cleaner. She caused a major and costly political upheaval in 2019 when she claimed to have made an earth- shattering discovery: a stash of ballots illegally harvested from officially declared ballot boxes as a ploy to rig the elections in favour of the Botswana Democratic Party.

She leaked the information to the opposition and the result, was that a truck that transported the ballot boxes was escorted to Gaborone by a long convoy of opposition- member vehicles. More UDC supporters came out in full force during an urgent court application at the High Court that established no electoral fraud.

Three years later and millions of wasted pula later, the woman has now lost her job courtesy of a dismissal letter written not by the Gantsi District Commissioner but a Permanent Secretary at the Office of the President. From what we learn, there was no convoy of UDC supporters that accompanied her to the disciplinary hearing and the party, which struggled to pay legal costs for its own election- fraud cases, doesn’t seem to have a back- up financial support plan for her. As Biko should have warned female supporters of Boko: “Black woman, you are also on your own”!