COVID VACCINES AS ‘ SETSWANA’ CHICKEN PIECES

If you had a rural enough upbringing, you will certainly remember glorious days that began with you and your siblings chasing, cornering and killing an unlucky chicken. The inglorious part was when other children from the neighbourhood came around to “play”, lingering longer than was beneficial to your dietary needs - or longer than they did on days when the smell of morogo wa Setswana wafted in the air.

The apportionment of the chicken pieces followed very strict protocol that put the family patriarch at the top of a literal food chain. He was served the choicest pieces: chest and whole leg. Grandmother would get the breast and wing, mother ( the cook) the leg quarters. Using her creativity and maintaining a pecking order, the latter would cut up remaining pieces such that each one in a family of eight was served just enough to add flavour to a mountain of starch. This apportionment of “Setswana” chicken has striking similarities with Botswana’s Covid- 19 vaccination programme.

When you think of it, the vaccines have a pecking order not unlike the apportionment: Pfizer is the chest and whole leg – which might explain why President Mokgweetsi Masisi only got vaccinated when it was rolled out. Johnson & Johnson is the breast; Moderna the drumstick; Sinopharm the tenderloin, the muscle of the breast, which runs along both sides of the breastbone; Sputnik V the wing; and Sinovac ( Botswana just acquired hundreds of thousands of its doses) the giblets – being the liver, heart, gizzard, and neck.