Botswana’s commitment to Pan Afrikanism suspect

We have been fence sitting for a long time. At independence we were thrown into the vortex of the spellbinding campaign for decolonisation of Afrika and for a fleeting while we gave the impression we were a truly pan Afrikan state.

That was until the might of apartheid laid us bare, and economic necessity eclipsed all other considerations to take centre-stage. We had to survive by any means necessary.

I doff my hat to our post-independence leaders (across the political divide) for the wisdom they displayed – it is a trait woefully missing in our contemporary lives, or at best on a painful free-fall down the cliff of doom.

From 1965 to 1980, we teetered on a precipice, managing a very fragile balance between the maintenance of solidarity with our fellow freedom fighters in the region and especially those to our immediate south, as well as flattering the egos of apartheid Pretoria, whose seaports our very economic survival depended.

But with the dawn of freedom in Azania in 1994, one would have expected Botswana – a founding member of the Frontline States and later Southern African Development Co-ordinating Conference (SADCC) which culminated in a treaty-based Southern African Development Community in 1990 – to radically assume an Afro-centric or Pan Afrikanist ideological posture.

Lo and behold, that was never to be! What could have informed this prevarication on the part of successive Botswana Democratic Party leaders remains a matter of speculation. However, it’s not beyond reckoning that the dominant global geopolitics, not least the seismic and transcendent Cold War era, which pervaded every fabric of the world and particularly, Afrika – could have been a determining factor.

Even as Botswana insisted in word that she was non-aligned, averse to the ideological isms, her development policies would eventually betray her real predisposition to a form of capitalism tampered with social welfare. For the discerning, this marked the harbinger of an evil future of inequality (as is now apparent to all and sundry).

The antagonists believed then that a complete overhaul and annihilation of the feudalistic economic system that existed at the time was the precondition needed for the laying of a just economic system, one that would neutralise the privileges of the nobilities and their colonial proxies.’

But as with the rest of postcolonial Afrika, nothing really ever fundamentally changed, except that passive political power exchanged hands between the Europeans and Afrikans whilst the system of economic strangulation that the colonisers had perfected, remained perfectly intact.

We see this clearly today as we explore and interrogate the slew of so-called pacts,, treaties, protocols and agreements that the colonisers and their financial adjuncts have enforced with the consent of post- colonial Afrikan leaders to ensure the perpetual enslavement of the mother continent!

We are held at ransom by the same agreements that we enter into with our former colonisers – this is the classical meaning of Neo-Imperialism!

Alas, not even Afrika’s blueprint for economic emancipation – the 1993 Abuja Treaty that bequeathed us the dream of a Pan Afrikan Economic Community (AEC) – has been received with pomp and fanfare across the continent, much less in Botswana.

If anything, it’s been a lukewarm affair until it birthed the Afrikan Continental Free Trade Agreement ( AcFTA), whose implementation has also been indefinitely postponed on the back of the ravaging Covid-19 pandemic.

We must however, make it unequivocally clear that not all of Afrika is excited by the prospects of a united Afrika – and sadly Botswana seems to be numbered in this category. This can be discerned from our past interactions with the rest of the continent and our half- hearted acceptance of Afrika’s Agenda 2063.

We saw it when former President Festus Mogae implicitly spurned Afrika’s overtures at self-regulation through a peer-review means test under the aegis of New Partnership for Afrika’s Development (NEPAD). It was only last year that we eventually acceded to this regime!

As for former President Ian Khama, we can’t even find the adjectives to describe the contempt and outright indifference with which he treated the Afrikan Union (AU) and its leaders. It was indeed during his reign that Botswana, sans identity, wandered astray!

Another trait that has defined every Botswana President is that we hardly ever observe May 23, Afrika Day. Worse still, our educational curricular continues to extol European conquests while excluding Afrikan heroes and heroines or worst of all, portraying Afrika’s culture in contempt.

The agenda that Afrika set herself for her economic emancipation is subverted and often sabotaged by African countries themselves! Let me explain awhile.

Take the example of the SADC economic community – which is touted among the regional economic blocs upon which this AEC is to be built.

Whilst the SADC Treaty of 1990 envisions the establishment of a regional parliament – to this day the region is still undecided about the utility or relevance of this most important governance structure! In fact, Botswana is leading the charge against the transformation of the SADC Parliamentary Forum into a fully-fledged SADC Parliament.

On many instances I have personally engaged President Dr. Mokgweetsi Masisi – an avowed pan Africanist in outlook- on this subject, but he has always avoided and evaded the question. It is a deliberate ploy to buy time.

I also heard MP for Selibe Phikwe West Dithapelo Koorapetse ask the same question recently in Parliament to International Affairs and Co-operation Minister, Dr Lemogang Kwape who also evaded it deliberately.

Based on such dispositions and actions in word and deed, I have reached the verdict that our commitment to PanAfrikanism is suspect. I say we can do better than this!