This past week, our national parliament passed a budget running into millions to buy blankets and radios for poor people.
Protests by opposition did not seem to matter.
Though their government is so clearly on the wrong, a vast majority of ruling party Members of Parliament are harked into line by red-coal pragmatism that stops them from voicing dissent lest their ambitions be cut short by a leader now notorious for unremitting vengeance.
Personally, I cannot think of a more patronizing, more interfering, and more meddling government than that which goes as far as to buy people blankets.
There is no better and more glaring example of just how our government is wholly convinced that many of our people are now completely unable to think for themselves without government assistance than a decision by the same government to buy them blankets.
The world over, governments are always expected to be a force for good. But all evidence suggests that citizens trust their governments at their own peril.
And ours is no exception.
A very large number of people in our country believe and trust President Ian Khama. They see in him an embodiment of an upright, sympathetic man who really deeply cares for the weakest members of our society.
They look at him as he spends hundreds of flight hours traversing the length and breadth of the country in his helicopter in the rural areas, there to meet and greet people, listen to them, and pledge all sorts of philanthropic assistance. They watch him on television as he often reaches into his pocket and give out his own money to a woman who cannot feed her child or send them to school, and they are left with no choice but to take his word for it that he means well. To them, he is a messiah, the best and finest of god’s gifts to Botswana.
But still there is another side also comprised of just as many of our people, a side which is made exclusively of the president’s enemies and detractors.
Among this lot President Khama is the worst thing that ever happened to Botswana.
To this corner, he is a cunning, blank-eyed manipulator who should never be trusted.
To this side, he has been the poison that has contaminated the cup that is our national politics.
On either side, there is no shortage of passion, exaggeration, table banging and breast-beating.
The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in the middle.
But the problem for Botswana is that under the current president, it has now become almost impossible to separate Khama the man from the government he leads.
He has created an entire government machinery in his image. And he is not done just yet.
Every little policy that his government comes up with is sold to the public not just in the President’s name but in his image as well. Questioning the policy detail is akin to questioning the very legitimacy of the president. It is tantamount to treason.
It may all sound mundane, but a decision by our government to actually see it as fitting, appropriate and harmless to come up with a budget that sets aside money, a substantial portion of which will be used to buy blankets and radios has been a withering verdict on just how far we have moved closer to becoming a proper nanny state.
Our government’s unending potential to surprise is all the reason why, as citizens, we should at all time be on the lookout. We should never let our guard down. Vigilance and alertness should be our way of life.
That said, we shall know quite soon if, as a people, we still have any level of pride left in us as to take unkindly to such condescending attempts at using money to buy our votes because this blanket budget is all that it really is.
In a different way, but still in every sense the coming contest for chairmanship of the ruling party between Samson Moyo Guma and Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi provides a little, albeit unreliable referendum against which this all consuming money-for ÔÇô a vote question will be settled.
I cannot wait for the outcome of the sideshow!
Even before government money was set aside to buy blankets there already was a groundswell of public frustration and resentment against President Khama’s infatuation with cheap philanthropy.
It has always been clear that the President felt enormous pressure to produce evidence that he really loved this country, its poor people and would want to be seen to be doing something about it.
But for a President whose re-election is as guaranteed as the rise of the sun, the budget for blankets has gone to expose not just unprecedented levels of vote-desperation on his part, but also altogether newer and deeper levels of insecurity that only trained psychiatrists can decipher.
For a man who has won every debate, killed all dissent, won every battle and has every peasants in the country in his pocket, budgeting for blankets and radios can only be explained as a clear moral and strategic error the true motives of which will take a really long time for many of us to internalize, let alone rationalise.
Make no mistake; we may still see yet more bizarre items than blankets being bought for the poor by the state.
The capacity of this government to surprise is only matched by its determination to manipulate the unsuspecting.
