There is a new lobby in our midst bent on influencing the country towards abandoning its time tested social welfare policy and adopting hard rightwing economic philosophies.
These are the same economic principles preached for decades by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and forcibly rammed down the throats of many African economies with untold human misery.
The strategy for this lobby group is to malign Botswana’s social welfare system.
It is a multi-pronged strategy.
Lately, the group has been getting more coordinated and vocal.
In fact, they go beyond just discrediting Botswana’s social welfare system.
They go as far as to say Batswana are spoilt xenophobes who expect everything from government.
To a large extent, this lobby is made up of descendants of the World Bank hard right economists.
Their campaign has recently been lent a mighty boost by way of official endorsement by the Bank of Botswana.
And with a venerated institution of such national importance behind them, the hard right has become buoyed and excitable, smelling that blood is not far off.
In their latest report, the Bank of Botswana has gone full length not just to discredit Botswana’s tried and tested policies of social welfare, they have effectively called on government to discard it as a matter of urgency and to embrace, with the same haste, a misguided but increasingly fashionable economic drift towards the hard right.
Unfortunately, no thorough analysis of Botswana’s peculiar socioeconomic circumstances is provided by the Bank.
That is lamentable.
We deserve better from a Central Bank, given the caliber of their officers (a number of PhDs) not to speak of huge swathes of resources at their disposal.
Given the groundswell of opinion that the social welfare policy followed by Botswana since independence is crass, it would be naïve of us to think of this as spontaneous movement.
My instincts tell me it is a result of a well thought out campaign by people with deliberate goals of using their social ties not just to influence national policy but to hijack it without giving the other side a fair hearing.
That said, there is nothing wrong with starting debates, (in fact debates should be encouraged) but stealth attempts to use such debates to become economic experiments that want to use a whole nation as guinea pigs should be resisted.
That is exactly the strategy of the economic hard right lobby.
Imposing a set of cold and aloof rightwing economics of the World Bank on Botswana will bring untold social catastrophe.
Experience elsewhere in Africa shows that when economic assistance is tied to a mandatory rightwing drift, countries are left worse off than the World Bank found them.
In their report launched two weeks ago, the Bank of Botswana takes a vaguely supported sideswipe at Botswana’s welfare system, just falls short of calling such government interventions immoral.
That is regrettable, given that interventions such as CEDA are meant to be sources of seed capital, providing soft loans as a way of enabling citizens to enter the business, hitherto an exclusive terrain of foreign nationals and a few citizens from the ruling elite.
What should be interpreted as immoral is turning a blind eye to the reality that almost all the foreign owned commercial banks doing business in Botswana have effectively redlined a majority of citizens, classifying them as high risk elements that are unworthy of credit.
To be fair to them, the position taken by the Bank of Botswana is not altogether surprising.
Their position is a postscript of conclusions reached by the Business Economic and Advisory Council (BEAC), a loose, and hastily drummed up ragtag of professionals set up by the Office of the President two years ago, with a uniquely vague mandate of advising on how to diversify the country’s economy.
Curiously the BEAC came up with a set of unapologetically rightwing recommendations that could easily have been drafted by the World Bank Gods in Washington.
These are the laisser-faire economic principles that have brought most of the developing world on its knees.
The composition of the council was also very instructive.
It had in it a good number of personalities who at various times and in various capacities played key roles in ensuring that Botswana took economic direction from which they were asked to rescue the country.
It was never made clear what criterion was used to select individuals to the council.
Worse, the council started on a wrong footing.
There was embarrassing confusion as to whose brainchild (between the President and his Deputy) the council really was; the situation was not helped by the fact that the council had, as its chair, the Vice President’s former brother-in-law.
What is, however, not contestable is that an admirer and formerly a high priest of the avowedly right wing World Bank consensus, President Festus Mogae, will be proud of BEAC and Bank of Botswana reports.
The disdain and contempt for Botswana’s social welfare policy as preached by the Bank of Botswana and the BEAC resonate with his bruising attacks on citizen economic empowerment policy as contained in his last State of the Nation Address.
In their respective reports, the BEAC and BoB have taken such attacks against citizen economic empowerment to new and intolerable heights.
That said, we continue to hope that, given the seriousness Batswana regard the Bank of Botswana, look up to and defer as a fair and impartial economic think tank, the Bank of Botswana will in future be careful not to reduce itself into such a dry and cut peddler of right-wing economic propaganda.
In the meantime, the rightwing consensus should be resisted.
Admittedly, Botswana’s social welfare policies have not been without faults.
What is important though is to plug the holes that are now being used by the hard right as reasons for calls for policy changes.
But in no way does the Bank’s knee-jerk and near spontaneous enrolment into the bandwagon of right wing detractors that criticize Botswana’s welfare policy as crass, while doing little to inform themselves of the situation on the ground, advances the course.
