Saturday, February 8, 2025

A nation at Cross Roads

1.1 Madam Speaker and colleagues allow me to respond to the address by His Excellency the President of the Republic of Botswana. I will do so by presenting the state of our nation as we see it. This presentation represents our views as the Botswana Congress Party (BCP) and comrades in partners, Botswana Alliance Movement (BAM), and New Democratic Front (NDF). Let me preamble my deliberations by stating that the BAM/BCP alliance accepts the results of the 2009 General elections with strong reservations. I will fully explain why.

1.2 Madam Speaker, the 2009 General Elections were free, but they were certainly not fair. The SADC requirements for a free and fair election were not met. These include among others, equitable access to state media and funding of political parties. In the case of Botswana the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) leadership used state resources to campaign for their party. The BDP was awash with financial resources. The source of funding remains a top secret. This is an anomaly in a democratic contest.

1.3 Despite the lack of fairness stated above, I am pleased with the performance of my party and the Botswana Alliance Movement (BAM), our cooperating partner. Our representation in parliament increased from one (1) to five (5). We have retained the seats we held before the elections while winning most of the seats from the ruling BDP. We have also made huge gains at local councils and made major inroads into former BDP strongholds. Talking about a BDP stronghold will soon become a thing of the past. The Central District Council recorded the highest increase and has the largest number of BAM/BCP councillors.

1.4 Madam Speaker, it is now common knowledge that the BDP was elected by 53% of the voters across this country. Forty seven percent (47%) of the electorate voted for us, the opposition parties, and independent candidates. This means that close to half of this Nation bought into our messages. The difference between the BDP and our combined opposition vote is 6%. This is an insignificant margin.

The BDP must be reminded that we are not here by accident. We did not fall from the moon. We are brought into this House by close to half of this Nation. We are representing these and the rest of Batswana during the whole period of this 10th Parliament. We shall therefore not allow ourselves to be intimated or be silenced in the manner that it was done in previous Parliaments.

I should say Madam Speaker that the BDP was elected on the basis of its promises and I assure this house and Batswana that my party ÔÇô the Botswana Congress Party and its cooperating partner of BAM are here to hold the BDP led government to those promises. We shall ensure that it delivers for the good of our country.

Ugly Campaign – Madam Speaker, during the campaigns a lot of nasty things were said about us as opposition parties including demonising us. I do not wish to repeat those things that were said about us here today. However, allow me to correct just two of those because if not corrected they will negatively affect our democracy and the way we work in this Honourable House. The first issue that we encountered during the campaign, and which was recently repeated by the local media following the election results, is the claim that President Khama is a Chief and that there are other chiefs in this House. The Vice President of the Botswana Republic travelled to Bobonong and told Babirwa and the Nation that it was an insult for our members to contest against Morwa Khama. He claimed that by so doing Batswana were despising President Khama because he is ”Khama” the chief. Madam Speaker, I am sure that behind the scenes President Khama, if he is politically mature, must have reprimanded his Vice President because this ill-advised leader did not only serve to his ignorance and lack of understanding of what democracy means, but he also embarrassed his own leader and his party by wedging an ugly campaign strategy. He displayed his subservient mentality and his democratic deficit that demonstrated his “command and obey” military credentials which should have no space in a democratic society.

1.6 Chiefs in Politics – In a party democracy, Madam Speaker, where power is competed for, there are no chiefs and no servants. We are equal contestants. President Khama is therefore not a chief but a politician. All those who chose to follow this route of modern political office should know this. There is no chief in this House. We are equal and the votes that brought us here carry the same weight. Anybody who wants to be chief should respect the rule of law of this country and resign from this house. Such a person should be advised to follow the traditional power path and go to the Ntlo Ya Dikgosi. So, Madam Speaker, you should rest assured that my Party will in this House be guided by the Standing Orders of the House and nothing else.

1.7 Divisive Politicking – The second issue that was raised by President Khama himself in Kanye and subsequently by many of his Party members during the campaign trail is that a BDP led government will not develop those parts of the country that voted for the opposition. They intimidated the voters and coerced them to vote for them. Indeed some voters did fall prey into this trap. I wish to correct this and regard it as “diabolic campaign talk” which is however dangerous because some people might take it seriously. It might actually be the BDP’s secret intentions to deny some parts of this country development because they expressed their rights differently from what the ruling party wanted. We want to warn the BDP not to destroy this country by such ‘careless talk’ even when said during the heat of campaign activity. We are here to guard against those discriminatory tendencies because we love this country and its people so much that we want to assure those 47% of the electorate who identified with us that they did nothing wrong and that this country will, during the coming five years, receive equitable development. Priority will be given to regions and constituencies on the basis of the greatest needs and not on which party they voted for. Developments to different regions will also be on the basis of NDP 10 that was passed by Parliament, unless the President intends to review NDP 10 to take voting patterns into account. We call upon President Khama to come out and explain to the nation whether he really subscribes to multi-party democracy or one party rule.

1.8 Challenges and Daunting Issues – Madam Speaker our Nation is facing a number of very serious challenges. We have collectively made some strides in the past. We have now come to realise that many of the good things and strategies that we used to get where we are today, will not take us into the future. Therefore, as the highest leadership of this country, we need to face these challenges squarely, honestly and act collectively to improve the quality of life of our people. I wish to turn to each of these because they best describe the State of our Nation today. These core challenges relate to our a) democracy, b) economy, and c) social development.

DEMOCRACY
2.1 The Crisis of our Democracy – Madam Speaker, I am concerned that in April 2008 President Khama presented his road map based on four (4) “Ds” that included “D” for Democracy, yet he has not shown any serious commitment improving our democracy. Regardless of which angle one takes to review our democracy, the conclusion is the same ÔÇô our democracy is at a cross-road. We have a choice to remain where we are or reform it drastically in order to improve it qualitatively. If we choose the former option we should be sure that we are sitting on a time bomb which is going to explode on our face and those of the next generations of our Batswana. The current polarisation of internal democracy in the ruling party is indicative of the dictatorship kind of state that Botswana is gradually slipping into. It is not known in a democratic state that only one person becomes so energetic and extremely intelligent to run the affairs of a ruling party single handedly. History has not known of a powerful leader in a democratic state who can manage and discharge the affairs of the state single handedly ÔÇô using daily directives and other dictatorial methods. These feature of governance are only associated with non-democratic styles of leadership.

Since April 1st 2008, Botswana governance methods have moved our society very swiftly into the characteristics of a mafia culture. Stories of unexplained extra-judicial killings of people, stories of unexplained cases of midnight deportation of people, extravagant expenditures on the newly established Department of Intelligence services (DIS), stories of allegations of human tortures by DIS agents; and stories of unjustified dismissal from public service have become daily bread and have dominated our local media. In addition, a culture of gossip, backbiting, bootlicking and distrusting of one another have preoccupied the minds and attitudes of Batswana, and more than ever before, huge fear has emerged in both the public service and local domain. Should this trend be allowed to continue in the next five years?

If we go for the latter and reform our democracy, then we need to overhaul the current system in order to restore the ideals of governance by transparency, collective decision-making and respect of detergency in thinking, of course, remaining resolute on increasing efficiency in service delivery as well as eradicating corruption in both public service and private sector operations. I shall elaborate on this later in my deliberation.

2.2 Special Election will not Increase Women’s Participation – Madam Speaker, ours is an aberration of a democracy ÔÇô a corruption of democracy. It is democracy full of adjectives. It is an election-democracy, a one-party dominant democracy, a male dominant democracy, a gerontocracy (elders dominated) democracy, and more recently, it has also become a ‘personality cult’ democracy. A true democracy needs none of these adjectives. If you think I am hard on ourselves, tell me; where are the women in this Parliament? The women constitute fifty one percent of our population and around 55% of the electorate. Where are they? We will not have them here through false attempts such as manipulation of petty rules such as increasing specially elected members or nomination of 114 councillors. These efforts of the BDP led government are gimmicks which call “tinkering with margins” which will not make this House a true reflection of the gender composition of this Nation. It is also foolhardy to claim that women will come to this House if women vote for women candidates. This is misconception which the BDP led media has been perpetuating. This is dangerous because it can create unfounded hatred between women candidates and women voters. Nowhere in the world and in a democracy for that matter, do women ever vote just for women and men for men candidates. What kind of democracy will that be? It is only “domokrag kangaroo democracy” which will operate in that fashion where women vote women, men vote men, youth vote youth, disabled vote disabled, chiefs vote chiefs, etc.

2.3 Urgency of Political Reforms – Madam Speaker, this country urgently requires serious reforms of its democracy. First we need to introduce a more representative electoral system. The proportional system across the world has proved to be more efficient in bringing representation of women, youth, minority groups, and better able to relate votes received to number of seats obtained. This system has made Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa pass us in terms of the number of women in parliament and Councils. Countries around the world which have moved close to gender equality in parliament and local government such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, etc use a proportional representation electoral system. So Honourable Botlogile Tshireletso, if you are serious about women representation and not just being used by your party to play a political game, then I urge you to support our motion on reform of our electoral system that we shall be bringing to this House.

2.4 The Constitution Needs Urgent ReformsÔÇöÔÇö Madam Speaker, our constitution requires urgent review to address many things that are stifling the further development of our democracy. We need to reform our constitution so that among others, it allows for direct election of the President. Imagine that if Members of Parliament were indirectly elected through Councillors, as is the President through elected MPs, Mr. Ephraim Lepetu Setshwaelo, Joyce Mothudi, Morgan Moseki, and Nzwaligwa Nzwaligwa will be in Parliament while Hon. Odirile Motlhale, Mmoloki Raletobana, Phandu Sekelemani, and Nonofo Molefhi will be in the wilderness.
We need to do away with the abusive specially elected members of parliament. We need to ensure that the powers of parliament are clearly defined and the separation of powers is fully implemented. We need our constitution to allow oversight institutions such as Ombudsman, IEC, DCEC, and the Office of Auditor General to report directly to Parliament. Our constitution needs review to include more direct social, cultural and economic rights of every citizen.

3.0 THE ECONOMY
3.1 The Two Nations Economy – Like our democracy our economy has reached a stage where primitive capitalist accumulation through corruption, exploitation of labour, repatriation of profits and pillaging of state resources by the leaders and their inner circles of relatives and friends have reached untold proportions. Inequality, poverty and unemployment levels have reached a stage that has turned this Nation into two nations of the “haves” and the “have nots”. The rich have become stinkingly rich and the majority extremely poor. Clearly, under the present government, wealth is seen only in members of the ruling party and their foreign friends and collaborators. The wage worker is getting poorer and poorer while the large numbers of unemployed youth are ever drifting not only into poverty, social and economic exclusion but worse still in to drugs, alcohol abuse and crime. These are destructive symptoms of a social and economic decay characteristic of crude capitalism.

3.2 The State Dependency is Growing – When, in a wealthy country like Botswana the majority of families cannot afford to pay school fees, over 100,000 people ÔÇô young and old depend on social safety nets from government and thousands other people live on vending and hawking of petty commodities such as sale of oranges, apples, sweets, airtime, etc, then we should ask ourselves is this the type of development our people deserve? This is the current state of our Nation.

3.3 The Indignity we Live In – Madam Speaker, President Khama’s own recognition of the so called four “Ds” is an admission that after forty three (43) years of his Party’s rule, Batswana do not live the life of dignity. Clearly without proper housing, land to produce food, cattle and other assets they cannot live dignified lives. I hope as he visits around, he is embarrassed by the number of beggars who turn to him for gifts and put all kinds of requests to him. What he sees out there is the face of poverty and indignity of our people to which they have been landed into by the BDP government over the decades that it has been in power. Unfortunately, he seems to think he can resolve this deep seated poverty by gifts and promises of handouts. Sorry, but he clearly has no clue of what is going on. The wealth of his relatives, friends and the donors to his party and family foundations, is in fact the course of the poverty of our people. His relatives and friends are all over taking away land and other property from Batswana. This explains why over 300,000 of Batswana rely on part-time casual jobs of the “ipelegeng” type and over 60% of those said to be working for government, local government and private sector in fact, live on marginal wages that leave them heavily indebted to banks and money lenders. Clearly, there is something fundamentally wrong with our economy. Yet this is the State of our Nation.

3.4 The Recession has Exposed the Failure of Strategy – The current world recession has exposed the poor economic strategy of this BDP led government. However, because it is a thick-skinned government that has been in power for too long, it is glorying in the fact that they were able to borrow money and use part of the foreign reserves to save us from a deep recession. Little does this government recognize that had they successfully diversified the economy, they would have saved jobs, saved those foreign reserves and avoided the level of debt that we now find ourselves in. In responding to this recession this government did not differ from the much poorer countries such as Lesotho, Swaziland and Malawi. Here as in these countries many people lost jobs and indebtedness of government increased.

3.5 The Cost of Unplanned Projects – As they were borrowing due to shortage of funds, this government was busy operating worthless and wasteful projects that were neither in the NDP 9 nor the Mid-Term Review. The eight or so hubs where people were promoted over night to top salary posts and were given millions of Pula to execute projects that were not planned for, had neither implementation plans or strategies nor staff have been and continue to be wasteful. The hubs take away scarce resources from supporting early childhood education and sponsoring Form V graduates to tertiary education and training. They have negatively affected spending on HIV/AIDS and other social development priority programmes. Millions of other Pulas have gone to security operations that duplicate police and military work. This is how mismanaged our economy has become. This is the State of our Nation, Madam Speaker not the rosy picture that this government has painted.
3.6 Let me turn to what needs to be done. First we need to stop immediately all the wasteful projects and focus our attention to what is in the Plan. Then we need to amplify some of the strategic goals of the Plan so that we address the following needs: accelerate economic growth and economic diversification, empower our citizens economically, create decent employment, provide comprehensive social security for the elderly population. These may sound like projects similar to the present government yet we differ fundamentally as we show below.

3.7 Developing our Middle Class – Our starting point is that we need to deliberately develop a sizeable citizen middle class that will drive this economy, create employment for others and retain profits within the economy to propel further growth. An indigenous middle class is what is driving successful economies of Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and India. The governments of these countries developed systematic programmes around education and training and economic empowerment to grow a strong middle class. We in the BCP/BAM shall deliberately set aside schemes such as exclusive sale of state property to citizens, demand that all foreign companies operating in Botswana have a minimum citizen shareholding and we shall protect certain industries such as agriculture and some selected service sectors to citizen ownership. We shall set limits to foreign ownership of strategic sectors such as IT, Hotel and Tourism to ensure effective citizen participation. We strongly believe and know from the experiences of others that with these efforts we would have laid down the foundations for the development of citizen middle class. The effects of such middle class will be for many of them to leave formal sector jobs for business thereby leave job opportunities in the formal sector to younger generation of better education and trained Batswana. The middle class will employ other Batswana with more decent packages than the current owners of businesses do. They will therefore be drivers of a new economic strategy. This will form the thrust of our citizen economic empowerment policy and law.

3.8 Exploiting our Natural Resources – Madam Speaker, our country is endowed with enormous natural resources which have not been fully exploited under the present government. We have a cheap renewal energy resource in solar energy which we can tap to electrify our nation, create jobs and export solar energy to other parts of the world. The world is going “green” i.e adopting environmentally sensitive production systems and solar energy is such production system. My Party believes that we should immediately focus on research and import of relevant technologies to harvest our God given solar energy. This project alone will turn this economy around in a short space of time. It will create jobs and opportunities for more Batswana to own business and it will provide additional tax revenue to government to address poverty problems.

3.9 Exploiting the New Technologies – Madam Speaker, under the present government we have not started exploiting new technologies to drive economic development. We need to aggressively bring IT technologies to be the centre of business in Botswana. Every school regardless of where it is located needs to have a computer laboratory and that teachers, students and local leaders have access to and use computers. Just this effort will grow communication, create business opportunities for those young people trained in IT and above all transform this economy to a knowledge economy led by an indigenous and international private businesses. We believe as BCP/BAM that research for development should be prioritised and that our universities and research institutions should be given funds to train large numbers of unemployed undergraduate in graduate studies. Graduate students will generate all types of new business ideas.

3.10 Using our Knowledge as a Resource – We should turn this country into a knowledge economy by making sure that we diversify our skills profile at the highest level. We therefore agree that human resource development should be prioritised. We should however, make sure that no child is at home or on the street when they should be at school or university. That is why for us, every Form V leaver who qualifies for admission into tertiary education will get sponsorship without any celing. Every four year old will go to pre-school and we will instil new cultures of self drive and dignity in high achievement which used to characterise our people. These ideas and strategies and many others we shall be bringing to this Parliament for debate during the life of this Parliament.

4.0 SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
4.1 The Lack of a Social Development Strategy – Madam Speaker, under the present government we do not have a comprehensive strategy and programmes for social development. We have fragmented activities and initiatives which are poorly administered. This is why rural development has failed, poverty has grown, dependence on government for handouts has increased and our children, the elderly and persons with disability live in misery. Our health status as a nation is poor. Our social and culture support systems have disintegrated. Our moral standards are very low. As a nation we are in a state of social and moral decay evident in tensions leading to so called “passion killing” and high rates of divorce. The social system cannot be separated from the economic system but this government thinks it is possible.

4.2 Special Programmes for Children – Madam Speaker, we need a comprehensive social development strategy and programmes that target support for children including early childhood education, children’s hospitals and other dedicated services to ensure the healthy growth of our children. Given our levels of poverty, time has also come to introduce child allowance to support children from poor households. We need to deal decisively with child labour and sexual abuse of children. As a country we ought to create the best condition for the healthy growth of our children. This should be done with close collaboration with families, social, health and education workers. This is what we mean by a clear strategy that uses integrated extension services. This strategy and approach will ensure that our children grow under healthy and socially conducive environment free of drugs, corporal punishment and exposure to other social ills of modern times.

4.3 Special Programmes for the elderly and persons with disability ÔÇô Madam Speaker, our elderly population is neglected and so are persons with disability. My Party believes that through integrated services provision and agro-economic intervention for rural and urban areas combined by social security, we can lift the social status of our elderly people from poverty and poor health. We should have one programme linking household economy, health, housing, social security and moral and social support for our elderly and persons living with disability. Our health system for instance, should by now be having targeted programmes for senior citizens and related groups. We should have special centres across the country where the very old would go for physiotherapy, entertainment and reading and just meeting to talk and make friends. This way we will release those who are looking after them to do productive work, we will also release grand children to go to school and we will create jobs for those who provide the services at these centres. These centres would also be partly owned by the private sector and partly by government. The social security (old age pension) will be raised to cover health, transport, and entertainment needs of this section of the population.

5.0 Conclusion ÔÇô Madam Speaker, I will like to warn honourable members, particularly those who serve in cabinet that this House shall not during our presence become a rubber stamp. It must be seen to be a Forum of serious debate and a tool for genuine resolution of the challenges facing our Nation. It should be a democratic institution displaying principles of respect of differences of opinion, equality, equity, justice and fairness.

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