One Saturday evening in 2006 as I was driving home after a few drinks I switched on a South African Radio Station.
Blaring from the radio was the voice of the then President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki.
He was delivering a Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture at Witwatersrand University.
It was the vintage Mbeki; intellectually suave and quintessentially pan-Africanist. He quoted from the Holy Bible, and extracted verses from such legendary poets like W.B. Yeats and classical literary giants like Shakespeare and philosophers like Rene Descartes.
He went at length to also draw from the American billionaire investor, scholar and humanist, George Soros.
A few days later I discussed the speech with a friend who as it turned out had also listened to the speech. He shared my opinion that he rated the speech as Mbeki’s best ÔÇô even ahead of the famous “I am an African.”
In the Mandela Memorial Lecture, Mbeki decried the creeping culture of worshiping wealth and money.
Mbeki was ruthless in his lament that human life has been reduced to nothing much more than money, the economy and material things.
He called on his countrymen to regain their lost souls; Ubuntu, as he called.
“….. the demons embedded in our society that stalk us at every minute seem always to beckon each one of us towards a realization of a dream and nightmare, with every passing second they advise with rhythmic and hypnotic regularity ÔÇô get rich, get rich, get rich….”
It was classical Mbeki.
I was reminded of Mbeki speech this week as I pondered just what criterion was used to invite Patrice Motsepe to be a guest of the ruling Botswana Democratic Party.
Public Opinion in South Africa is heavily stacked against Motsepe. Many South Africans believe Motsepe’s wealth is neither a product of entrepreneurship nor ingenuity.
They believe that Motsepe made his billions from political connections especially with the African National Congress.
Motsepe, for the record has an elder sister who is married to Cyril Ramaphosa ÔÇô another billionaire who has since become the Vice President of South Africa. Motsepe’s younger sister, who I learnt some years ago studied at the University of Botswana, is married to Jeff Radebe, an ANC princeling who is currently a minister in the presidency
And that is not all.
The most important thing is that Motsepe does not represent what the BDP stands for.
He may be awash with money which is a dream of the many pseudo-plutocrats that currently the BDP, but the fact of the natter is that in Motsepe’s native country, people like him are allowed to own natural resources ÔÇô a position that Botswana, through the Botswana Democratic Party has deliberately resisted since independence.
At independence, President Sir Seretse Khama determined that natural resources were for all Batswana, held in trust by the state and to be used to develop the entire country.
It was a policy that was to be followed by Sir Ketumile Masire.
Festus Mogae went further to give the policy a newer and fresher theoretical grounding when he delivered what has since become a seminal a public lecture at the University of Botswana. 
It is a policy precept that has made Botswana the envy of the world, which allowed the strengthening of our democratic institutions at a time when countries endowed with much more resources like Zaire had to contend with official looting, state sponsored plunder, civil wars and racketeering.
Does the BDP invitation of Motsepe signal a looming change in policy?
This is a legitimate question we need to ask. 
As one BDP activist agreed with me in a recent conversation, “Motsepe has nothing to teach the BDP. He is an example of the extreme end represented by corruption and malfeasance.”
The BDP activist concluded the conversation by posing a rhetorical question: “The arrival of Patrice asks of us; where are we going?”
The answer, I am afraid is explicit on Thabo Mbeki’s speech delivered nearly ten years ago at the Mandela Memorial Lecture.
“The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles…. People deserve respect because they are wealthy,” cried Mbeki.
I do not know Motsepe and am not dying to be seen seated next to him.
My only worry is that his arrival here can only further contaminate our politics.
His donation of his ill-gotten money to the BDP can only add further imbalances to our already skewed political field.
I learn that in his speech on Friday night he praised in glowing terms Botswana’s empowerment laws.
Batswana will be shocked to learn from Motsepe that there are any citizen economic empowerment laws in this country. He derided such countries like Namibia, Kenya, Malaysia, Singapore and surprise, surprise, South Africa.
Motsepe is today worth over $3 billion. By his own account, just over twenty years ago he was facing foreclosure and fighting off the deputy sheriffs.
It was then that he started making all his wealth from deals cut through South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment disposition.
No such arrangement exists for Batswana. Just how then does a state beneficiary of largesse fly into Botswana on a private jet to lecture our people that Botswana is better than South Africa when it comes to citizen economic empowerment?
Does he know any Motswana with a billion Pula in their bank account?
We may rally against Motsepe, but the fault really lies with the current crop of BDP moneymen who are not well grounded on anything that their party has stood for.
For them party positions are a means to attaining the kind of wealth that they see in Motsepe.
As Thabo so correctly put it, “… personal pursuit of material gain as the beginning and end of our life purpose is already beginning to corrode our social and national cohesion.”
In short Motsepe was invited here by those whose pursuit of material gain is by itself the beginning and end of all there is in life.
How tragic.
