The pains of childbirth
Our country is in labour pains.
Back in 1965 a collective euphoria accompanied the march towards independence from the strangulation of British imperialism.
But today, I can hear excited calls for self-determination from Ramatlabama to Ramokgwebana; from Nxamasera to Martins Drift even from Tshabong to Kasane.
Suddenly Batswana are asserting their rights; they are desirious of carving their own political destiny – and it’s all thanks to the wisdom of our sages – our Kings and troubadours – past and present, who never tired to speak truth to authority. We are witnessing a collective desire for true independence; an independence in which citizens and not politicians are masters of their own destinies; a future in which citizens plan and execute their own budgets; control and manage their own mineral resources and their rich genetic resource endowment. This is the Botswana in which we can talk of a shared future; a Botswana in which we can build a united and propserous nation that looks after its resources for the good of the present generation and prosterity. That future is well within sight. I can see it in my crystal ball! All this feuding between the former president and the incumbent is symptomatic of the good that lies ahead. Of course we must expect the storm before the calm. Every war has its own casulaties and collateral damage.
This may come in the form of loss of lives; declarations of curfew; limits on civil liberties; mysterious disappearances and other atrocities that can be visited on a people. We must prepare for the worst if we hope for the best. Freedom is won with the blood of martyrs. These are the men and women who are willing to sacrifice their personal lives for the good of the nation.
They are patriots!
They are not beholden to archaic systems that have failed to sustain national cohesion; they use their personal wealth to materialise their dreams – the dream of a better Botswana.
I see this current wave of political excitement as the contractions induced by our material reality, which should naturally culminate in the birth of a truly independent and free Botswana.
A Botswana in which the people are not beholden to any one person or family but instead defer to collective institutions that they themselves, have set up.
A nation that makes its own laws for the proper governance of its people and not one that waits for its colonial masters to remote-control it and wage a war of attrition on it that is designed to plunder its resoures. We are all in our various individual capacities building a nation that we want. It is a multicoloured nation that holds a myriad of talents. We should not suppress this revolution.
My favourite troubadour counsels us that, it takes a revolution to make a solution and so we must be grateful for the revolution that is playing out before our eyes.
It’s a good thing to be alive at this time. The worst mistake that any one of us can make is to keep quiet. Suddenly we have found our voices. Let us use them to shout out and shape the Botswana that we want.
For as long as it is the battle of ideas not a battle of guns and ammunition, we can only say, ‘play on.’ But even then we should shy away from abusing one another through hurling of perjoratives and adjectives that demean the humanity of one another. Above all else, we must remember that we are brothers and sisters from different mothers and fathers. We are one people, we can differ but we should not go to war to defend our viewpoint. If anything let us come around a table and thrash out our differences in dialogue. This is the essence of our Tswana axioms - mafoko a kgotla a mantle otlhe; mmualebe o bua la gagwe gore monalentle a letswe; kgosi ke kgosi ka batho; molaa kgosi o a bo a e itaela – which have for time immemorial laid a strong foundation for our nation state.
Let’s remember that this nation state was fashioned out of tribal groupings. We must abhor with a passion any one or any school of thought that tries to drag us back to those tribal formations.
Out of many must come out one; this is the essence of multiculturalism in which people of various hues and shades celebrate and do not denigrade their cultural diversity. This is the Botswana we want; and so we say let the revolution rage on, if it’s designed to evolve this nation state, the Botswana that we all want. A Botswana in which the war of attrition in which foreign interests plunder our resources is shunned with a passion!