Woes of a forgotten citizenry: 57 years later
They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single footstep and 57 years ago the nation put one step forward, a step in a terrain marred by a foggy uncertainty of what would become of a once upon a time Bechuanaland.
As the curtain falls on September, many are always taken aback at what the “underdog” has turned into. For those who were alive on the day 57 years ago, many still fail to reconcile what they see in the present with the bleak yesteryears of Botswana at its formation. The failure of course being the stranglehold on the imagination of trying to reconcile what was, with what is.
It’s not just the senior citizens of the country that marvel over the resounding economic success of the nation of Botswana. Over the length and breadth of the world, Botswana is hailed as an oasis of some sort, a nation of prosperity and wealth, a picture of a nation of all things galore but that narrative is where the line begins to blur.
In 2022, the World Bank flagged Botswana as one of the most unequal countries on Earth. Statistics Botswana reports that 503,000 people live below the poverty datum line, surviving with less than P27.95 daily on a real adjusted basis. While the World Bank reports on these gross inequalities and high poverty levels, elsewhere in the world, Botswana is seen as a land flowing with milk and honey, even as the majority of citizens survive on crumbs and live in poverty.
The Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis (BIDPA) has also revealed that the economic playing field in the country is rigged against women, with the earning gap between the two genders being miles apart and the development of the country being largely skewed to the favour of males.
“Gender disparities are still visible in the labour market,” the policy think-tank said.
“Even though there has been an increase in female labour force participation, the rate of increase has been lower than that of males.
“Since 2008, the percentage of women employed in the economy increased from 43% of the total workforce to 49% in 2016, and the labour force participation rate stood at 56% which is lower than that of males at 67.8%.”
Without a shadow of doubt, the nation has achieved an unfathomable economic growth, surely greater than originally expected. However, eyebrows begin to rise when the same brush that paints the success story of Botswana’s economy, tries to smear over disparities in the economic livelihoods of Batswana.
The blurry part of the divide is perhaps better understood when captured from the lyrical wealth of one Letta Mbulu, the South African Jazz Maestro.
In her song titled “Not yet Uhuru”, Mbulu questions the meaning of national freedom that does not trickle down to the freedom of mere citizens abiding in that state. She casts doubt over the meaning of freedom without the acute context of what it entails. Uhuru is Kiswahili for freedom, meaning that the songs title is “Not Yet Free”. Her song, though loved by many, is comprehended by a few and her words as Botswana turns 57 are perhaps worth reflecting on.
September 30th in Botswana is in layman terms “Freedom Day”. The nation celebrates political and economic freedom from the former British colonial masters. However bringing Mbulu’s song into context, the question to reflect on is: Can the mere Motswana on this day celebrate economic emancipation from the shackles of economic slavery and poverty?
The question is can the mere Motswana claim that his/ her country’s sparkling economy is actually trickling down to their daily lives? Can the ordinary citizen celebrate independence like a true economically liberated citizen?
Rewinding the tape back to 1966, to a time when the economy was as crippled as the mere Motswana’s livelihood, one will remember from what history teaches that
Botswana was dealt a bad hand from the onset, ranking among the poorest countries in the world with little or less than 12km of tarred road.
Average income in 1966, was P60 a year and life was dependent on subsistence farming with agriculture marking itself as the leading economic activity in the country. Breaking the income monotony, some funds flowed in, repatriated by Batswana patriarchs who worked in the Gauteng mines filling the gap left by South African black man who were on tools down because of conflict with their apartheid government. Legend has it that Batswana man who went to work in South African man were easily identifiable by their bicycles with a radio at the back, a prized asset back in the day.
The economy was surely bad but it was possible to say the people were one with their economy. They were in charge of the economic machinery that fed them and despite the economy being bad, it was within their control. At Independence, agriculture owned by Batswana, contributed at least 40% to the economy, but after the colonial masters disposed of what they thought was a “barren Botswana,” the dynamics would start to quickly change. Batswana would remain with a dummy of economic freedom, a buzzword or a token day at the end of September.
In 1967 just after “independence” diamonds were discovered with the first true kimberlite discovery near Letlhakane. Many attribute the late discovery to luck, claiming that previous colonial master wouldn’t have let Botswana go scot free. The diamond discovery would shift attention away gradually from agriculture as the economy began to rely more and more on diamonds.
The problem of diamonds however was that unlike agriculture, not every Motswana would be allowed to “till” the land in search of diamonds and bring them forth for sale. This is understandable enough. It wasn’t agriculture where each individual was allotted a plot to till to produce economic value. This is where citizen participation began to encounter its first knocks.
Launching the Orapa mine, the first President of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama had the opportunity to address a nation in limbo, wondering what their role would be in the new world of development preached by Seretse. His address to the citizens who used to self-sustain by agriculture was that now they would turn into mining artisans, surviving mostly by what they earn as salaries and wages from mining revenue as mining began to dethrone agriculture as the leading economic sector. “I should like to speak first about the need to ensure that workers at this mine do not enjoy benefits from their employment that are unnecessarily out of proportion to those of workers and farmers in the rest of Botswana,” he said.
Building an economic artillery that viewed the citizens as artisans would skew the working environment away from the citizens and deny them citizen participation in the mining value chains where they would be limited to being labourers until improvements started weighing in as the mining agreements between De Beers and Botswana were reviewed. Unemployment has also come to the fore to rob citizens of a chance of prosperity. The International Monetary Fund estimates that annually 35,000 graduates hit the job market in Botswana and creating jobs for these young men and women has proved to be an uphill task for both government and the private sector.
According to Statistics Botswana’s Quarterly Multi-Topic Survey covering the period to December 2022, extended unemployment, that is the combination of those actively seeking and those not seeking employment, stood at 328,926. The nation is surely a success story, the economy flows with milk and honey, but the question is how much of this milk and honey flows to the people?
“You cannot celebrate freedom if you do not have bread on the table. We have nothing to celebrate. “Our people are still staying in shacks. Our people do not have water.
“Our people do not have electricity. Our people do not have proper roads.” - Julius Malema