‘Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor’
Ihave carefully read through the Draft Bill to amend the Constitution of Botswana published in the Extraordinary Gazette dated March 12, 2024. It is clear to me that the Tswana tribes are not willing or prepared to let go the exercise of their unjustified superiority over their non-Tswana counterparts. However, I believe the time is overdue for the non-Tswana tribes to rise and speak up for their liberation. They have desired peace for too long now, and at the expense of their own integrity.
The great Afro-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King jr. had this advice to offer to his followers: “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
The Afro-American is where he/she is today, in the United States America, because of these wise and encouraging words of Martin Luther King jr. Indeed, the time is yet for an oppressor to voluntarily say, I have oppressed you enough, you may now have your freedom. That should not be expected in this case; and I have to add, that there are countless ways of demanding your freedom but to speak softly and nicely like a beggar is not one of them.
There is no country in Africa or elsewhere, to my knowledge, except Botswana, that has institutionalised tribalism as nation building, declared one tribal language as the national language in its Constitution and went on to abolish the teaching of other languages in the country, save for the English language; and the non-Tswana tribes are expected to oblige and forego their respective cultures, identities and whatever else, for the sake of such notion of nation building.
The United Nations, through its agencies, has, several times over several years, taken the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP)-led government of Botswana to task over its treatment of the indigenous peoples of this country without success. One of the questions raised by the UN agencies was, of course, the issue of mother tongue education, which is recognised internationally by all the civilised world. The government of Botswana has, at best, been very evasive in its responses to the UN agencies and has done nothing whatsoever to rectify its faults.
In my mind, Botswana is a rogue State, which has somehow earned the reputation of being a shining example of democracy in all of Africa. No doubt, this is partly due to the dead silence, with murmurs only, of the oppressed tribes of this country.
The clearest evidence that Botswana is not a democracy is the formation, almost immediately following Independence in 1966, of several tribal associations complaining of being left out in the Constitution and demanding equal rights.
Their demands have silently been ignored by the government and some of the associations have, as a result, coalesced into the umbrella organisation called Reteng, which means we are there, but they have not as yet, in my view, exerted enough pressure to bear on the government to address their legitimate grievances. There is no question at all that the proposed constitutional amendments as contained in the Draft Bill referred to above are typically evasive, like all previous constitutional amendments on this issue, as they don’t hit the nail on the head, in that they don’t deal at all with the tribal inequalities as contained in the Constitution and some of our laws.
The Tswana tribes are still the principal tribes (as in the original Constitution) who alone and each own land and together the land Botswana; and as if that is not enough, they are still the overlords who rule over the non-Tswana tribes irrespective of the latter’s numerical strength over the overlord in certain cases. I am being as frank here as I, possibly and honestly, can be, and I invite anyone who cares, to challenge me.