These must be the last days of the world preached in various scriptures. Perhaps these are signs of the end of the time because even hard-core atheists are horrified by the hostile unfolding events. It is written that, ‘but realize this that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, ungrateful…false accusers, traitors…’ 2 Timothy 3:1-4.
We are living through really trying times with accelerating unemployment, retrenchments, rise in poverty levels, water shortages, electricity shortages, declining quality of education and so forth. These challenges are indisputably crippling the economy and perhaps soon to render the country ungovernable. This is in spite of so much potential on account of the country’s endowment with natural resources and still more on account of political stability second to none in the continent. Yet, rather than invest all of their energy towards steering the ship from the troubled waters, the captains elect to growl at the victims of their un-visionary leadership.
This essay bemoans the institutionally entrenched culture of insulting the needy members of the Botswana society. A worrying trend over the years has been the increasing use of stereotypes that are designed to hold ordinary citizens responsible for the perilous times. While this has been trending for some time, it has amplified and assumed the status of a lousy national anthem. Some years back while still Minister of Education, Mr Jacob Nkate remarked that people are in poverty because they are lazy and refuse to do menial work. Some business owners have bluntly revealed that they prefer to employ illegal immigrants because Batswana are not only lazy but very expensive. Today every single Government Minister the explains magnitude of the present crippling challenges facing the country from the principle of the next door neighbour sleeping off a life in state benefits by mocking Batswana as an ungrateful lot, scoundrels and skivers who want to live a remarkable life they do not deserve and content to coast on social welfare benefits and related state-funded concepts.
Listening to government Ministers berating citizens for the trouble besieging the country is like listening to a parent chiding their child for their failure as parent to give him/her a decent opportunity for schooling. This disease seems to have infected the civil servants who as well have taken to scolding their countrymen for the government’s failure to invest in securing human basic needs. Officials have made it a scared utterance, an amusing foreword to a presentation and with the energy of demons they never miss an opportunity to chide us for what they consider to be our lack of interest in protecting the country wildlife and tackling the phenomenon of wildlife trafficking. Batswana are accused of colluding with foreign nationals to poach when the truth is that an average citizen lacks the wherewithal to effectively partake in this profitable venture hence we remain poor. It is noted that in the context of these wild accusations, the word ‘Batswana’ does not refer to all citizens of Botswana but rather to the needy members of the society who are openly despised by their ‘owners’.
In other societies they say, our people our enduring advantage whereas in Botswana the ‘people’ are a hindrance to prosperity. We ordinary citizens are accused of killing (predators), ‘eating’ and trafficking wildlife because we have no idea how much it is contributing to the country’s prosperity. The truth though is that the people who are engaged in wildlife trafficking are the very people who are peddling these falsehoods about the low class for they are resourced, well-organized, technologically sophisticated and connected.
The water situation in the country, especially in the south is also blamed on the average Motswana who is accused of having a poor appreciation of water resources conservation. The Botswana Daily News of 23 June 2014 reported Honourable Minister Mokaila challenging Batswana to save water further stating that ‘some people fill their bathtubs up to the brim and that water is wasted’. ‘Some people’ here certainly exclude the Honourable Minister and his peers for it is unlikely that the Minister could attack or scold himself. Thus, in the context of this accusation, ‘some people’ refers to those who are presumed socially irresponsible and these are the needy who have been turned into object of amusement. This is preposterous and serves to show case the evil minds of a leadership that is full of enmity against the average Motswana.
Unlike the wealthy that bathe or swim in bathtubs the size of a tiny lake, many an average
Motswana uses a small bucket and or a bath bowl to wash their face occasionally. In the same way, the average Motswana is always accused of not taking up government programs to uplift their standards of living and for not using condoms for protection and to manage the course of reproducing delinquents and dirty scoundrels. The average Motswana is accused of causing veld fires that occasionally destroy the rich man’s farms and wildlife. The average Motswana is accused of littering, theft and drinking themselves to death with government stipends meant to uplift their lives. While it has always been fashionable to blame the low class for all problems afflicting mankind, this characterization of the average Motswana as the root cause of society’s problems has gone to dangerous levels for it seems to suggest that the best way to get the country out of this morass is by slaughtering and incinerating these genetic carriers.
Truly, the under-class hardly ever chose to be poor and it is nonsensical and insane for government Ministers and their officials to suggest that poor people are self-inflicted anarchists, disorderly malfeasance, and wicked hooligans hell-bend on causing havoc in all sectors of the economy. Indeed times are perilous when a government is without any natural affection to its people yet by pretences and flatteries, they always manage to creep into the favour and confidence of the very people they despise so much supposedly because such people are ignorant and easy to screw. You know that these are hard times when a government hardly knows which way to turn or what to do except to insult the low class. In truth, government officials and the political leadership are prejudiced against the truth by apportioning blame to those whose collective destruction of the environment is insignificant compared to the damage caused by greedy and piggish men of corrupt minds. The motive though is to divert blame and responsibility away from those who make key decisions.
The tactic is to shift responsibility for failed development policies away from those who made these policies and blame the spectators for not cheering on their failures too hard. To a greater extent, this tactic is working as evidenced by increased persecution of the average Motswana who, as a result, has acquired such an infectious low self-esteem to the extent of tolerating such outright falsehood. Bereft of ideas, incompetent and desperate, government Ministers and their officials have become professors of the blame game, too keen to heap blame and the social cost for economic inertia on the poor, when in actual fact they have literally assigned the basics of life such as water to the benign hands of God. And when our country has to live under a constant sense of virtual collapse and difficulty of one sort or another, in the minds and on the lips of those corrupted by the disease of inequality – the noble culprits, the average Motswana is characterized as lazy, foul-smelling, wasteful, diseased, unambitious, violent, sexually irresponsible, doggy, drunk, unproductive misfit and a hindrance to prosperity.
