Everything feels so cold, so ghostly, so gloomy and despondent. There is hopelessness everywhere and many of the causes of our despair and hopelessness did not start with the present government. The paralysis of government and the pressures on our lives have been building for years and years.
We all know the litany – polarization, partisanship, disappearance of oversight, cadre deployment in the public service, intense infighting for government tenders, executive secrecy; the list is endless. These have always dogged successive BDP governments.
It is only that in recent years these perils have taken on new appearance and magnitude that is troubling and depressing. These longstanding woes have, in the last few years, tipped toward a real crisis and it seems things are going to be worse before they get better, if they ever will get better.
We have let it rot for far too long perhaps because we thought that bemoaning, lamenting and muttering like trainee witches about these ills would alert the ruling elite that we were watching and deeply worried about the state of affairs.
It is easy to complain, bemoan, lament and threaten to fix things in as much as it is easy to slip into a beautiful analysis of the problems with our government. But that is not enough especially if we lack a collective craving to effect change in fundamental ways.
When you see the struggles of those who are working and get a salary at the end of every month; when long-service employees from across organizations cannot show anything meaningful they have acquired in their working lives, you reach the probable conclusion that as a people we have lost the plot.
In recent years, the performance of our national government on as many fronts has not only been abysmal but irritating.
When you see those who have a tertiary qualification from reputable institutions such as the University of Botswana, University of the Witwatersrand, Botswana International University of Science and Technology and many others, but have no work and no prospect for a job in the foreseeable future, your immediate reaction is that life is a lie and even get tempted to believe the drivel that education is overrated. .
To put mildly, life in Botswana has become the embodiment of anguish, hardship, misery and a symptom of the bigger fiasco – a dysfunctional government of a ruling class that is refusing to cede power and yet cannot do the basics.
In effect, Botswana has suffered the contempt of many in recent years especially for being an attraction for international crooks and those who have no other option but to remain in the country or those who have no other means to make a decent living by exploring uncharted grounds elsewhere in serious economies.
At the risk of sounding nostalgic, there were times when government tried to do the right things. For instance, there were times when oversight institutions tried to do their work and many would wince as public officers were grilled mercilessly.
While some government departments continued to be negligent and misappropriated public funds, they did so under the counter knowing that they were being watched and so had to minimize waste.
Even as we knew that these oversight institutions lacked the bite, some serious oversight was nevertheless done by those mandated to oversee government departments. Not anymore!
Since 2008, oversight has vanished as relevant institutions ignore their responsibilities in preference for over-obsession with snooping on distraught citizens. Interestingly, those who are expected to protect these molested oversight institutions, specifically the executive branch of government, treat them with indifference, disdain and open contempt.
In some cases, oversight institutions have been deliberately paralyzed so that they did not have the capacity to deal with complex and stealthy operations executed by trained, sly spooks and this is mainly through cadre deployment wherein delinquent ruling party activists are rewarded with blue-chip positions in very strategic institutions.
In effect, government departments and sneaky individuals have no fear of the oversight institutions because these institutions have shown no desire to do serious oversight or to at least put the fear of God into them.
The result is that public assets have been turned into wild berries that are free for all and readily available to those who are not afraid of life in the jungle.
Related to the disappearance of oversight, is the death of a scathing, critical and cynical voice from the ruling BDP backbench. For some bizarre reasons, contemporary backbenchers see their role more in terms of defending the executive that they are supposed to scrutinize through penetrating questioning and constructive criticism.
The nature of today’s parliamentary questions or the line of questioning suggests that the backbenchers generate questions reluctantly, perhaps because the questions would have been shoved down their throats by their constituents which explains why they have to bend over backward to avoid annoying the executive
In truth, the backbench has gone out of its way to avoid criticizing government or asking tough questions in ways that make the executive believe that they are above criticism or that they are always right.
The passivity of the backbench and the disappearance of oversight serves to consolidate government’s aversion to sharing information with the public, in the process, normalizing Batswana’s tolerance of executive secrecy hence we carry on with our low lives like people who have become numb to any kind of pain.
The net effects of this lack of transparency in the conduct of government business have been devastating with many public officers giving jobs to friends and relatives under dubious circumstances, while some acquire prime land using public money without any sanction whatsoever.
It is now apparent that these perils had existed beforehand but have overtime taken on a new magnitude. The rot erupted when public officers boasted that they accounted to no one and such officers getting away with death.
It flared up when successive BDP administrations got over-obsessed with politics of irrationality, marginalization and violent dislike for critics from within and from without. The rot hardened when the ruling elite started pursuing a brand of politics premised on classifying those who disagreed with the way they conducted as unpatriotic saboteurs.
It has been said that the difference between a politician and a good leader is that a politician thinks about the next election while the good leader thinks about the country.
Successive BDP governments have lost a sense of responsibility to the nation in pursuant of narrowly defined goal of political survival.
They have virtually stopped governing in preference for seeking attention by enthralling and charming the small man into hero-worshipping them. They have abandoned the value of responsibility and duty to those they lead and their obligation to the nation.
Forget about blanket donations and the spiked soup served with traditionally baked bread rolls, successive BDP governments have lost a sense of value for life and caring.
That a considerable number of Batswana have arrived at the conclusion that their country is trapped in an era of despair is proof of a society that is a moment away from being unequivocally convinced that lamenting and getting angry on Facebook concedes nothing without concrete action in the form of a struggle.
When the leadership of the republic is focused on making life difficult for those who hold a different view, all we can bear is the sense that we once lived lives that were full but not anymore.
When the leadership of a ruling party publicly boasts that it their time to eat [by sharing the nation’s wealth among themselves] you reckon that time is near.
It is very painful to watch your country fall apart before your eyes. Yet, while the agony is unbearable, the most tragic reality is that as a people, we seem to have normalized our suffering ad have become numb to pain.
We have become accustomed to complaining and wailing all year as that alone will save our country from becoming a failed state.
How we ended up with spiteful, incompetent, vulgar, discourteous and dangerously greedy leaders is something that we need to deeply interrogate especially if we are serious about saving the economy from being run over by organized gangs in executive suits.
Agreeing that we once lived lives that were full, productive and assured, and that somewhere along the way we drifted away from our basic ethical principles of collective prosperity, it shouldn’t really be difficult to find ourselves and rediscover our poise. All we need to do is introspect, go back to the intersection and start all over again. With the right mind-set, this is doable because we have a template, a glamorous history and the requisite resources.
