UB honours Swaneng students
The University of Botswana (UB) as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations has honoured four Swaneng Hill School students and a staff member who contributed to the development of the institution.
The five Swaneng youth lost their lives to a car accident while engaging in crowd fundraising exercise for UB in Serowe in 1976. The quintet is four Swaneng schoolgirls, Maitumelo Kgari, Magdelene Khumalo, Sarah Mathware, Elizabeth Masake and a male staff member Fantisi Gaothobogwe (27). At the time the quintet was responding to a national plea by the Botswana’s first president Sir Seretse Khama to Batswana to contribute in the building of a national university.
The UB in the run to celebrate its 40th anniversary held a ceremony to honour fallen hero and heroines recently at Swaneng Hill School grounds in Serowe. Speaking at the ceremony, the assistant minister of Education and Skills Development, Aubrey Lesaso said the quintet is present the true foundation of which the UB was founded.
He lauded the quintet for being bold to defy the age factor and lend in a hand in the building of the now 40 year old institution. Lesaso further it is because of the sacrifices and boldness of the departed youth yesterday, today and tomorrow’s generations continue to reap the rewards from the institution. “Young as they were, students at Swaneng Hill School, developed an incredible urge lend a hand too. They undertook a journey to fundraise for the establishment of the University of Botswana, a journey that would later prove improbable, not because they floundered but because fate decided otherwise - a fatal car accident.”
“When other people dream of a future, others not only dream about it but create it. These five departed souls demonstrated abilities as catalysts for social change. Young as they were, they demonstrated to be visionary. They lived the ideals of a united nation that espoused development underpinned by the spirit of self-help which has sadly waned today.
As we remember and hounour them, we cannot help embracing that future they created for us.
They laid a foundation for us that our transformative agenda can only be realised if education was tempered with production. Thus, they did not only see themselves as just students but citizen conscious of their social responsibility to practically contribute to the national development agenda,” Lesaso said.
For her part the UB chancellor, Tebelelo Seretse said the departed quintet is a true testimony of the motto ‘Motho le Motho, Kgomo’ of which the UB’s foundation laid upon. “I wish to call upon you to rediscover who we are as a people. Let us go back to the very foundations that made us this nation we call Botswana. The values that shaped us and birthed most of our old national schools including our own University of Botswana. I talk here of selfreliance, Letsema, and mephato.
This demands from us to put our heads together and pool our resources as we did during the ‘Motho le Motho, Kgomo’ initiative to embark on crowd funding activities for projects that will better our own lives and thus, lessen undue dependence on government.”
“I will not be off the mark to say that at some point in our lives, we have encountered people who have inspired us to do great things that made a difference in our communities. For some, we failed to emulate them because of self-doubt. We failed to discover the potential in ourselves.
We failed to unleash this power inside us, not because we lacked the desire to do so but sometimes our minds were blinded by the wrong notion that we were too young to make any impact let alone to be noticed. However, for these fellow citizens whose lives were cut short before they could reach their prime, it was little less about being young or being known to the rest of the world,” she said.