We speak with great pride of the Peoples of Tunisia and Egypt, and to some degree of Yemen, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. In the last three nations, democratizing activity will intensify, and it will, no doubt, spread to Libya, Iran, Algeria, and many other countries run and whose wealth has, for a long time, been pillaged and plundered by dictators who pretend to democracy when they, in truth, are tyrants. We heartily congratulate the valiant Peoples of Tunisia and Egypt who, without fear of mortal consequences have, against all odds, reclaimed their countries from shameless despots.
These great Peoples are not dissidents, as some have called them, nor do they merit other than superlative epithets and praise. They are true patriots who so love their countries they were prepared to risk life and limb in order to take back what is naturally theirs, their God-given right to an equitable share of the resources of their countries. They put to shame many of us Africans who endure life under evil regimes who, with utmost arrogance regard us, the People, as their chattels and the resources of our countries as their personal property to be shared with their friends, relatives and friends, with impunity.
Sub-Saharan Africa is replete with Governments little different from the dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East. Even countries in Southern Africa which pretend to democracy are not truly so, for democracy is a value system that is founded on the imperative that We the People, are the beginning and the end, and that what belongs to our countries belongs to us collectively, to be realized for the equitable benefit of all, our individual leaders each counting as each one of us, and as no more than that, for the purpose.
Our Governments boast of having been democratically elected when they, in reality, are elected by people who exercise no choice because there is no choice to exercise. When the people are unemployed, hungry, poor and diseased, have they any choice than to vote for those who treat them as a beggarly lot who they feed with crumbs from their dining tables!! Does a mother exercise a choice when the only way in which she can feed her children crying from hunger is by voting for people who perpetuate their stay in office by keeping her in a state of poverty and conditions of beggarliness, using the resources of her country to which she has an unfettered right as a bribe to gain her involuntary support, and with temerity boast of it!
The heroic peoples of Tunisia and Egypt, and the awakening people of North Africa and the Middle East, have given notice to all dictators in Africa and elsewhere. They have said to the masses in every one of our countries that we, collectively, are a sleeping giant that must awake and restore to The People what belongs to The People! They have said to us that the might of our Governments, with all the hardware in their arsenals and other State coercive apparatus, are as nothing against the noble power of the degraded masses whose lives are so without worth on account of extreme deprivation that they are better lost than sustained in an existence without human dignity.
Our Government must need, as a matter of urgency, examine the conditions in which the Youth and Workers of this country and their families, whether in Government or in the private sector, exist, and must act to ameliorate them. The time comes when a People, without warning as happened in Tunisia and Egypt, grow tired and erupt to assert their right to a fair share of the wealth which their country has to offer. There is no democracy, whatever the electoral processes followed, when The People wallow in dire poverty and carry on desolate lives, when the Youth get no education and training and the few who do, get no jobs, when some Youth graduates are “interns” who get no internship, and do it only on account of the desperate hopelessness of their lives, when mothers and fathers, in order to barely support their children, spend all day long cutting grass in the scorching sun for P360 per month, when the rural of our People have to make do with measly hand-outs, when the police, soldiers, and prison officers of our country work in deplorable and dehumanizing conditions ! Government of Botswana, say not that you were not warned, and know for a certainty that you are by no means immune to a peaceful overthrow by the People as has happened in Tunisia and Egypt, and as will yet happen in more North African and Middle Eastern dictatorships! And as must happen in many African dictatorships!
Pilane is BMD Interim Spokesperson
