A little over 20 years ago if someone asked me what where the chances that global society would end the HIV/AIDS epidemic I would not have managed to answer the question to any level of satisfaction. The spectre of this scourge to us in Botswana was frightful enough to forestall any iota of optimism.
If someone asked me the same question today about the possibility global society and general, and Botswana in particular will defeat the coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic any time soon, I would not give them any reasonable expectation to dream that big.
This is not to say I am a pessimist; far from it. It simply means that I have seen enough devastation of society because of catastrophic health emergencies and disastrous management of such terrible afflictions in communities for too long this opening century. I have seen too much pain and suffering in individuals, households, communities and general society. I have seen enough hardship and sorrow, in both the scathing and indifferent depredation of these diseases, and in the scant, rarely determined, battle to defeat these diseases, to know that a General who goes into a war like this is always realistic enough to keep an open mind about anything, and everything.
The fight against HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 is a science-based and data-directed war. I am confident that eventually human ingenuity and sense of urgency will prevail. But right now, right where we are at this very moment, with the Coronavirus and Covid-19 adding more soldiers and weaponry on the side of the enemy, it really would appear we are poised to climb a mountain higher than Everest before we can even think of laying down arms and returning to the tranquil lives of the past.
Botswana is groaning under a disease burden so cumbersome, so devastating, and so aggravating, it’s really a miracle that we still have a country at all, that we still count as a nation, and a republic, in the global stage of equal sovereigns.
Let me give you a portrait of Botswana, and why I feel so deeply the pain of viral damage to my country, why I feel so deeply the burden of a nation, and society, imperilled by disease and disappointed hope for almost forty years.It is always a great risk, I think, for a writer to try to enter that dangerous carven, the unexplained deep, dark, and rich hive of a huge country, and nation, like Botswana. In its terrible silence the depth, and consciousness, of a country; every country, is always an eloquent statement in its own terms: something so profound many would argue no one should dare to peep into it.
But is it possible such depth is something like a human personality, something to be left untouched? I don’t think so. In fact, not even human personality is sacred. We pry into it all the time. This is something that all writers, in one way or the other, do all the time. It might seem ridiculous to talk about the eccentricities of a country but that does not mean such things do not exist.
Every country has its own blemishes, attractions, its own things of beauty and glamour, its own perils, troubles, and violent terrors, its own unique forms of pleasing deportments and cultures of madness. It would be a great thing if we had a camera to capture all these enthralling things in all their splendour and ugliness and point out to an amazed international audience: this is Botswana!
But such technology does not as yet exist and, in its absence, we only have our minds to do the job, and the human mind, as we all know, is a very suspicious, and often capricious, instrument…cynics may even say a most preposterous, and promiscuous, machine.
But I happen to believe in the human brain, in its capacity to capture the reality of things in its own way. Allow me to cut in on Botswana experience, as a nation and a country, driven by a strong desire to appropriate the fruits of modern civilization, a drama as tragic and humorous as any in the lighted and decorated stage of human development and enlightenment.
I wish I could start by unceremoniously throwing out one of our most cherished frivolous obsession; the notion that as a country we are the best there is in the world, that nothing in beauty, accomplishment or new world innocence compares with us, that we are so unique we don’t actually exist in any literature…and it is unthinkable that we should…and all that foolishness, but I cannot do that: Batswana would not read my work; that’s just how strong a great lie can have a stronghold on national consciousness.
So, I am just going to go around this jingoistic mambo-jumbo in a more creative fashion, by acknowledging its sincerity through perfect intellectual denial, or obfuscation, or both ways. Why? Because reality is always a highly contested thing, the muddled terrain of all human speculations. I don’t pretend to possess a perfect understanding of Botswana as a country and a republic; only what I have experienced as a citizen and what keen observation permits me to write as I do.
There is no other motivation. Botswana is a beautiful country. A geographical expression with a scary vastness. It is a land of happy people turned sullen by endless misfortunes; droughts, plagues and diseases. A country possessed with a remarkable human spirit. What holds us together is the strength of our internal organic moral coherence.
But what happens when such beauty is struck by terror? It’s wilts; and that’s what happened to us when HIV/AIDS hit the country in 1985. By the time Covid-19 erupted into the world stage in the spring of 2021, Botswana was already a disfigured nation. These diseases destroyed the health system, depleted the treasury and did untold damage to the collective character and spirit of the nation.
Let me also say something about the phenomenological impact of both diseases because it is usually the sociological pathologies that bring ruin, dishevelment, and often destruction, to both nations and civilizations.
I am approaching this subject from the perspective of not just health economics and public policy but also from the broader perspectives of modern theories of justice. I am a humanitarian professional. In my everyday life I stay focused on a lot of issues surrounding human welfare and dignity, sometimes even matters of life and death. This is what plagues like HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 bring into my line of work every day, and I have had experience enough to know what works and what doesn’t when you operate in an environment of severe scarcity and petitions against violence and death almost every moment of the working hour.
At Impact Botswana , we have a founding document with clear objectives of our humanitarian philosophy; primarily designed to address the urgent needs of HIV/AIDS prevalence crisis in Botswana, a mandate now inevitably expanded to cover the coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic as well.
At the core of this mandate, we work to advance the human rights and well-being of underserved people throughout the country. We take courageous risks to do the sort of things that fall out of the political system, or are insufficiently represented in public policies. We see ourselves as advocates of democratic responsiveness.
We support innovative community partnerships and promote relationships between ourselves and government, between ourselves and other civil society organizations and relationships between ourselves and international development partners.
We encourage good corporate citizenship and do our best to promote sustainable development at the local level; especially among marginalized groups and minorities, serving as unique levers for pioneering social change on the issues and events of our time and the demands of our age. We consider it our duty to particularly emphasize gender equality and rights of the most marginalized persons.
My experience is that to drive change, and make sustainable impact you have to be true to yourself, to be authentic in your vision and efforts, and gauge credibility by the labour you invest on social justice and human rights issues in communities.
This explains why we support organizations and projects that apply gender, racial, economic and human rights or social justice lenses to their work. It also explains why we are always seeking new approaches, skills and partnerships that aim to reshape the next wave of social justice movements.
My personal experience, especially from years of working within the wounded world of HIV/AIDS, when every village throughout the country buried the dead every morning; the worst possible national nightmare, is that with leadership and commitment, these problems can be solved, countries at war have survived worse experiences.
In the advent of Covid-19, for example, we have already started a bold march in new directions of social interventions. We are painfully aware that methods and strategies of the past can longer work for us, or for the vulnerable people we serve.
In fact, individual, household and community vulnerabilities have themselves dramatically changed in the span of just one year due to the combined assaults of HIV/AIDS and the coronavirus pandemic.
So we have already started the arduous, but necessary, task of making sure that as an institution, Civil Society must both reinvent and rebrand itself to be better placed, and better equipped to rapidly confront, mitigate, and solve the problems confronting modern Botswana society, particularly the frightening rise of vulnerabilities in the most vital parts of public life; namely, 1) society itself, 2) plagues that violate human lives leading, in some instances to deaths-HIV/AIDS and COVID-19-are good examples, and 3) collapse of moral values leading to appalling, often fatal, subjectivities to the harsh realities of modern existential crisis and social upheavals.
I long discovered, through personal experience, that organizations, and public institutions-including government departments-that fail to adapt to new public threats and evolving ways of doing things in public life very often become ineffective or irrelevant.
It’s time civil society organizations and government structures, systems and processes started cultivating new strategic mind-sets to problem-solving. It’s time to reframe partnerships, adapt to outcome-based functionality and inaugurate purposeful and rewarding social action in Botswana humanitarian culture. We must start asking ourselves important questions before trying to research and address social problems. What are the best methods of creating the conditions necessary for social coexistence? Or what are the best strategies for mobilizing social action under such appalling human conditions? Is that which is solved in the unsatisfactory social state necessarily disposed of given the terrible uncertainties brought about by the unknowns surrounding Covid-19 disease itself and the emergency vaccines now available in the global market? How does social action help the structural transformation of public space so that those who are made even more vulnerable by such disease burdens can sustainably enjoy the benefits of social mobility in post-pandemic society?
How do you elevate social action from the spectacles of public opinion to the concerns and practical attention of public interest when the future is so uncertain for so many people? For social action to extract resources from public goods what must it involve under the present conditions and circumstances? What methods are most successful at achieving this? How effective is social action that offends public law in times of national crisis? Is the best social action that which establishes spontaneous order or that which establishes sustainability in the lives of beneficiaries?
Should social action be directed at only those social problems that the state or public policies are no longer capable of solving? How can we best sustain emergency social action? What are the best ways of ensuring that humanitarian action does not create more problems than it solves? For humanitarian professionals to succeed how should they navigate or negotiate the terrain between politics and public administration? Should social action be something bigger than particular decisions and programs or should the two work together?
How can humanitarian professionals equip themselves to be effective integrators of knowledge and action in view of the data-driven and science-directed social interventions brought into democratic space by the current human efforts to fight the coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic?
We are asking ourselves these questions because experience teaches us that the answers to them will bring about not only better solutions to future social problems but also because we expect a new management of human expectations in the field of civil society activism and even the rise of new social justice movements as result of the depredations of Covid-19.
At Impact Botswana, we believe in actions that build the future through sustainable solutions of the social problems plaguing society today. We seek partnerships in likeminded organizations and strongly advocate for broad-based public discourses and research work that aim at building resilient communities and productive economies for democratic development and equitable distribution of opportunities in life, health and welfare.
