Sometime next month, President Ian Khama will deliver the State of the Nation Address.
Like a commander who has seen morale slip down through the ranks, President Khama will seek to rally the troops, telling the nation that the country is well on course to economic recovery.
Statistics will be churned out in wanton abandon to back the narrative that, as a country, we have never had it so good. But still that will only be half the story.
Certain Government quarters are extremely nervous about the lack of progress on many fronts.
These are the people who are abnormally conscious of the gulf that exists between the promises that this government held out when it first arrived and that which has actually been delivered thus far.
There is no doubt that for most of the time President Khama means well. But it is an extraordinary state of affairs, this lack of progress on more important things, especially for a man who arrived on the scene selling himself as Papa Action.
As things stand, the President is yet to announce to the nation any firm policy direction he wants the country to take.
Compared to his predecessors, the amount of time Khama has been awarded to duck questions of policy has been extraordinarily long. That I suspect is perhaps a most glaring outcome of the President’s genuine popularity among the people he leads: Everybody is just too happy to give the President a benefit of doubt. No one dares ask difficult questions lest they upset the aura of serenity that the president so clearly enjoys.
In the meantime, we have all been keeping track of events, reacting and dutifully following them as they unfolded all on their own ÔÇô leaderless and rudderless. For their part, the folks in the countryside continue to swim in a lull that at long last they have a President who likes them as week in and week out they are taken in by the President’s charm during his twice a week visits.
Perhaps not surprisingly, in all such visits no hard questions are asked on just where it is that we are headed as a nation.
We shouldn’t expect any new answers in the coming State of the Nation Address. The tragedy though is that such vacuum of national political ambiguity is taking us nowhere. If anything it delays us from searching for alternatives, let alone bracing ourselves for hard time eventualities.
A lack of a clear and coherent national agenda has thankfully not gone unnoticed by some of the more clear-sighted cabinet ministers. It was much better four years ago, some of them have started whispering.
You could blame Festus Mogae for his aloofness, but he always made it clear where we all were headed, they continue. Since then matters have gotten worse. Today we are a country running not just without any clear agenda, we also have no vision to talk about, no strategy, no political identity and increasingly no inspirational leadership to look up to.
I had assumed that, with an opposition that is technically on a deathbed, the President would now have more time on his hands to put his plans into action.
Tragically, that has not happened.
In his State of the Nation Address, the President will heroically tell the nation that things cannot be as bad as the cynics have been alleging. In effect, he will say his favourite project, poverty eradication scheme has never been more revitalized.
While not doing much to appraise the nation on progress made on key announcements he made in last year’s speech, at the end of it all the President will play down all allegations that his 5Ds are now in disarray.
A failure to account, including a steadfast refusal to make an admission of previous misjudgements, is a constant that has been so much a character of many past State of the Nation Addresses.
He will ring alarm bells about floundering spirits of patriotism, and as in so many other speeches lecture the nation on sacrifice.
Salaries have remained well below inflation, but like the media, trade unions are likely to take their share of the now mandatory annual ritual of battering from the President.
He will curtly dismiss calls by unions for salary increments as disproportionate, unpatriotic and reckless.
An attempt will be made to put a wedge on public servants by acknowledging and commending those who have not bothered government with calls for salary adjustments.
The President is not likely to dwell much on Botswana Meat Commission, save in passing by way of saying that a committee of experts has been appointed to save the abattoir.
I don’t expect the President to say anything about the Botswana Development Corporation which has been dogged by corporate malaise that can easily be traced to the country’s cabinet table, but which has to date been met by a blithe lack of concern from the President.
We should not expect any comprehensive report on the country’s state of education system. Education, we must point out, has ranked high in the country’s current leadership.
We would be naïve to expect the President to say just how it has been that, four years on, the country still does not have access to the National Stadium, a shocking incompetence that has gone unpunished even as it has blatantly rendered the President’s delivery message a complete nonsense of political grandstanding.
As a departure from his mantra when he arrived into office, President Khama will not say much about delivery in the civil service, except, of course, to touch on a few breast beating results of international surveys that speak highly of Botswana.
We should accept that things are going horribly wrong for the country, that many of our people have reached rock bottom and are increasingly hopeless and despondent.
In short, we should not expect anything new to come out of this year’s State of the Nation Address.
The event has become an irrelevant relic which we only observe because it is a part of the country’s official calendar item.
