Holding onto money
I tried to write a speech for my brother-in-law recently, but it didn’t work out.
As in, he decided not to use it. I think the problem may have been that I wrote what I would have liked to say instead of what he wanted to say.
Alan, a former navy man, had been asked to deliver an Independence Day speech to a group of servicemen and their families at an American Legion celebration on the fourth of July in the United States. These are patriotic people who take their country and government very seriously. I, on the other hand, have lived in Botswana and the UK for the past 30 years and am out of touch with what is happening in my native land, so it’s no surprise my efforts failed to hit the military target.
The thing is, I enjoyed the research and I learned a few things about the US struggle for independence that I hadn’t been taught in school, and some of it seems relevant to the establishment of Botswana 56 years ago. That’s why I’ve decided to put it to use now.
I started the speech that didn’t get used by telling Alan’s potential audience that the American Declaration was about taxes, and saving money. That’s not the normal take, and it probably wouldn’t have gone down well. The best-known part talks about other important things, like the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness… but most of the document is about money.
You see, Thomas Jefferson and his buddies wrote the Declaration in 1776 to explain to the rest of the world why the American colonies didn’t think they should have to pay taxes, or anything else, to the King of England. In fact, the colonies stopped paying taxes and the fighting began a year before the declaration was written.
They also wanted the world to know The United States was an independent country that could make its own treaties and trade agreements. That opened the door for cheaper imports and allowed Americans to keep all their export profits instead of giving a cut to the king… and it allowed France and other countries to help the rebels without officially messing in Britain’s internal affairs.
The Botswana Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, is one sentence at the beginning of the constitution which reads, “Botswana is a sovereign Republic.” But then the constitution outlines the fundamental rights of each Motswana to life, liberty and freedom from racial, tribal, religious and sexual discrimination. The financial stuff only comes right at the end and there isn’t much of it.
But that doesn’t mean the motivation for establishing Botswana was different from the one that drove the American colonists to fight for independence. The colonists wanted to be able to buy tea and other things they didn’t grow themselves from the cheapest source, and they wanted to make as much profit as possible on their own goods.
The same held in Botswana… especially in the case of natural resources. And while the Americans didn’t declare independence until after the fighting had begun, Botswana’s leaders waited until a year after independence to mention there were diamonds in the ground.
Unlike my speech, that worked out well.