Social media which has become the modern public court has been abuzz with the issue of a demoted BDF female soldier for appearing on The Voice Newspaper’s famous Page 3 where semi-nude girls appear every week.
This is a landmark case at BDF and this will make or break this military organization as far as military law is concerned. As a retired officer from this establishment, I should begin by stating that BDF was in no way ready for female soldiers.
This hard-line opinion is derived from two scopes of thought. In the first instance, BDF senior officers were already accustomed to the culture of fraternization way before women were enlisted.
BDF has had women working at various capacities from cleaners and cooks to human resource specialist and medical professional. The most undoing thing has always been that senior officers existed with that mentality that these women had come to serve and gratify their insatiable sexual desires for most of which bordered very closely to sadism.
The second reason I would like to advance to beef up my case in that the establishment was not ready for women is the fact that by the time the first female officer cadets were brought, there was no adequate legislation that governed and protected them from these men with predatory sexual tendencies.
The BDF Act still reads as a piece of legislation created to govern the macho man. For a time these women had to be governed by pieces of disjointed “regulatory junk” often referred to as circulars. Such circulars were meant to govern women on when they could get pregnant and when not to.
At a later stage the BDF Act was revised as it was increasingly becoming evident that governing women with several pieces of disjointed “law” was becoming difficult.
But is amazing that those who were in charge of reviewing the Act were themselves conflicted in that their major focus was to give themselves more airtime in the barracks. The retirement age was certainly a priority and it was raised from fifty-five years to sixty years. Regarding the issue of women, the most significant change brought in was with fraternization. Otherwise the rest was with just amending him to read as him/her.
The military is a special institution. When one joins it like the girl in question and many others including the young men, they need to understand that they are losing a lot of their constitutional rights such as freedom of association which would allow one to participate freely on such adventures like modelling.
The military has a sub-culture of its own and training forms a part of that inculcation into such norms and traditions. The rights of the individual person begin to revolve around these traditions and the law governing this peculiar institution.
From the discussions carried on a WhatsApp platform of Military Veterans of Botswana it has been shown that there is divided opinion over the matter of the demoted female soldier.
My opinion on what she did is that she veered off course to discredit the integrity of the defence force. Joining the military can reduce you more to a child who needs to acquire permission for almost everything. If it is a requirement to ask in writing for permission to get married, then the young girl should have known better.
But Major Kenneth Rapoo, a retired legal brain from BDF, and now running a successful private law firm has brought in a very interesting perspective regarding this current issue. He sees this as like the issue of the woman who was brought before Jesus by a band of men accusing her of adultery.
BDF spends money from government coffers every week to buy senior officers who prosecuted this soldier newspapers including The Voice Newspaper. For most of them, their first stop on this particular paper is Page 3 where semi-nude girls are displayed.
None of these officers has raised an issue as to why government money was spent aimlessly on a paper like this particular one. It was only until one in their ranks was involve and there was uproar.
The biggest problem that I have with the kind of justice she received is that the verdict was premeditated by someone high in the echelons of leadership. This is why the soldier was retried twice after the initial trial to extort a guilty verdict.
The time the case goes to the high court as it certainly will, it will be “Things Fall Apart” for BDF. This is the reason why BDF needs the office of the Judge Advocate General in place to prevent this sort of miscarriage of justice. The appointment of JAG must be expedited.
I still maintain that this soldier was obliged from an integrity point of view to desist from participating in such practices. Some soldiers have been dismissed before for unbecoming behaviour whereby they displayed extreme rock sub-culture. Some of them had aluminium pots hanging on chains from their buttocks. Here there was a clash of two sub-cultures and the military one prevailed.
The fact is, the female soldier had committed an ignorable offence which needed a simple reprimand. By prosecuting her and extracting a guilty verdict by all means was not a necessary effort when taking into account that there are officers who have gotten involved sexually with these female officers and were not even given a verbal reprimand.
For this woman, the presiding officer needed to have tempered justice with mercy by giving a reprimand. This judgement sends in a very wrong message and precedence in that senior officers in their stupor out of the waters of mortality have gone as far as overturning government vehicles and have still enjoyed protection from prosecution.
BDF is certainly going by double standards and this will severely affect the discipline of the force and pull down the morale of those still willing to serve. Begin with prosecuting the big fish who have had a cut in big military contracts and those who have had their farms financed and developed from government coffers.
