She has had a distinguished, decades-long public-service career that was supposed to end in distinguished fashion. However, in a digital realm where algorithms favour negative content, it is just a matter of time before Unity Dow v. Attorney-General is overtaken by content posted to the France Museveni Facebook page. Such algorithms will favour “millions which went through your PRIVATE SECRETARY” than what the African Women in Law website says about her: “Unity Dow is a pioneer in her field because she never conformed to the injustices in her country.”
The world knows Dow as a paragon of virtue who famously and successfully challenged a provision in the Citizenship Act 1984 that conferred citizenship on a child born in Botswana only if his father was a citizen. Married to an American who had come to Botswana to work as a Volunteer Peace Corps, this provision was an issue for Dow personally – as indeed it was for many more Batswana women in similar matrimonial situation. With this victory, Dow’s star shone the brightest and today the Unity Dow v. Attorney-General judgement enjoys global patronage in jurisdictions that use Roman-Dutch law.
When De Beers discovered alluvial diamonds in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, it wanted the entire reserve declared a red zone and in line with its policies. The victims were G//cui and G//ana Bushmen whom the government would forcibly remove from the CKGR in 1997. Dow was one third of a three-judge panel in the Roy Sesana and Others v. the Government of Botswana matter which had drawn international media at three venues: New Xade, CKGR and Lobatse. Dow’s own and very progressive judgement favoured the plaintiffs. The forcible removal of the Bushmen communities had been attended by hideous cultural insensitivity on the part of government officials. In one case, a senior government official separated a married couple and to the husband’s protest, countered that there was no evidence that the couple was legally married because they didn’t have wedding rings on their fingers. In general reaction to cultural insensitivity of this nature, Dow noted in her judgement that a hut in the CKGR was “not an apartment in New York or Block 8”. Dow’s Wikipedia profile says that she has Bushmen ancestry.
Wikipedia says much more about her. She was one of the founding members of Emang Basadi, Botswana’s first women’s rights pressure group and served as part of a United Nations mission to review the domestic application in Sierra Leone of international women’s human rights. She was elected as a commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists in 2004 and re-elected to the post in 2009. She served as a member of a special mission of the International Legal Assistance Consortium to assess the Rwandan judicial system and evaluate how the country could emerge from its past of conflict and rehabilitate its justice system to ensure that defendants in the 1994 genocide cases receive a fair trial. Upon retiring from the bench in April 2009, Dow went to the United States where she lectured at the Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia, the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and Columbia Law School in New York.
In February 2010, Dow was sworn in by Kenyan president, Mwai Kibaki, as one of the justices on the Interim Independent Constitutional Dispute Resolution Court to help implement Kenya’s new constitution. Two years later, she was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as one of three independent experts to conduct a fact-finding mission on how Israel’s West Bank settlements affect Palestinians.
Dow is also a fiction writer, having published four novels and contributed to numerous literary projects. Fetson Kalua, a professor of English Studies at the University of South Africa, has described Dow as “the most influential writer of fiction in Botswana today.” She is a recipient of honorary doctorates of law from Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio, 2001), Saint Michael’s College (Colchester, Vermont, 2007), and the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Scotland, 2009).
Here at home, Dow holds the records of being the first Motswana to have served at the highest echelons of all three branches of government. She was Botswana’s first female high court judge. After an uncharacteristic resignation from the bench (judges hardly ever resign), she was specially elected as MP in 2014, appointed assistant minister and later full minister under President Ian Khama. With the latter appointment, she became the only Motswana, thus far at least, to have served in the judiciary, executive and legislature. Khama’s successor, President Mokgweetsi Masisi, retained her as minister but she would later resign for reasons she still won’t disclose.
Going back to 2016, questions began to be raised about the moral uprightness of this paragon of virtue. Then she was Minister of Education and Skills Development (since split into two) and The Botswana Gazette published a story about her law firm doing business with Limkokwing University of Creative Technology. The paper reported that Limkokwing’s Senior Vice President, Dato Gail Phung, was a close friend to the Dow family and had attended the wedding of Dow’s son in 2015. As all other private universities, Limkokwing is more a commercial than educational venture. Most of its students are sponsored by the government through the Department of Tertiary Education Funding (DTEF) and there is always fierce competition among private varsities for these students. One particular conflict-of-interest issue that the paper raised was that someone who supervised DTEF had, in a personal capacity, a business relationship with a varsity that wanted favourable treatment from DTEF.
The paper reported that rather than answer the questions put to her, Dow stalled and “blackmailed” the reporter with a veiled threat to expose his own misdeeds.
“I am investigating a small matter about yourself,” the paper quoted Dow as saying in written communication. “Rumour has it that you are targeting me for political reasons and that there are ethical issues that require scrutiny – (issues of under-age girls and unpaid child support have been mentioned). I am waiting for information which will only be provided by end of the week.”
The irony of it all was that Dow has built a decades-long reputation for being outspoken. It would seem though that she is only outspoken when she is not the target of criticism. While she can be outspoken about Khama’s dictatorship and the overreach of the Directorate of Intelligence Services and Security, she gets tongue-tied when she has to explain her own eyebrow-raising actions. Where she doesn’t get tongue-tied, she chooses not to provide explanations that members of the public need. Last week, she called a press conference to deny allegations that she is part of a plot to topple Masisi. Such allegation had been made on the France Museveni page but was not the only one. Hours being the press conference, the page had published even more damning allegations that Dow has steered clear of. However, if she wants to retain her standing, both here at home and abroad, she will have to answer charges made against her. Otherwise her ability to get on her soapbox about virtue would have been desperately compromised. The issue is not who France Museveni is but whether what he alleges is true or not. The world that placed her on a pedestal also wants to hear what she has to say.
