While I am well aware of the fact that newspaper editors are weary of permitting dialogue in their papers, I am nevertheless counting on your benign indulgence to allow me to rebut only the most outrageous falsehoods and half-truths made by renegade and quisling Olebile Gaborone.
Those who derive strange satisfaction from living in the past tell me that Gaborone peripherally belongs to the royal family in Tlokweng. Well, there is nothing royal about the things he writes about me.
In fact, he is very petty.
In his bitter diatribe against me, Gaborone bangs on about what he calls my ‘abysmal performance in Francistown’ South parliamentary elections as an independent candidate. Well, this is exactly my point – that Gaborone’s only real achievement in the BNF is the celebration of the fruits of a diabolic destabilization of the BNF under his leadership, which took the form of a reckless and irresponsible orgy of suspensions and expulsions of BNF comrades coupled with an attempt to impose their puppets and bootlickers on the electorate, even where we had beaten those bootlickers in primary elections.
He goes back to his BDP masters a happy man after almost succeeding in killing hope ÔÇô the BNF remains the only real embodiment of the oppressed peoples’ hopes and aspirations.
Although the odds stacked against me were daunting in that as an independent candidate, I was fighting both the BDP and my own party I did not chicken out of the race. Besides, only the most naïve person measures my success in terms of the number of people who voted for me. I did not set out to win the constituency; I set my own standards and targets. The lily-livered Gaborone chickened out of the Central Committee elections because he knew that he was going to be routed. He then tried to blame everybody for his cowardly behavior.
With much gusto, he adds that ‘I lost dismally to someone who touches the lives of the electorate positively and is in touch with the people of Francistown’. Do not be fooled into thinking that quotation refers to a BNF candidate!
Typically, the traitor and political turncoat Gaborone unashamedly celebrates the fact that the constituency was captured by a BDP member who has since defected to BMD. He remains remarkably silent about the ‘dismal’ performance of the BNF candidate they tried to impose on the people of Francistown South. And, of course, the man’s silence on the number of constituencies they so generously handed over to the BDP is deafening, to say the very least. Where are the 29 seats they promised to deliver to the BNF?
Gaborone thinks I am contradicting myself when I argue that he is a political mafikizolo and parachute while at the same time I endorse Duma Boko’s election.
It is simply laughable for Gaborone to imagine that his BNF credentials are better than those of the BNF President, Comrade Duma Boko. Boko’s detractors love portraying him as some kind of Jonny-come-lately in the BNF who was formerly with the NDF.
I am not aware of Comrade Boko’s political activism in the NDF. What I know for a fact is that Comrade Boko’s track record, not only in the BNF, but in leftist politics in general, is second to none. If my memory serves me well as a student political activist Comrade Boko had a short stint with MELS. He has authored many articles defending the party even before the birth of the NDF, which explains why he has a good grasp of BNF politics. I also know that he, like many BNF activists, was greatly inspired by Dr Koma’s leadership, and, unlike Gaborone, understands that the BNF is a ‘liberation’ movement.
Gaborone rants and raves about me having ‘vowed to render the party unmanageable’ after the infamous Molepolole Special Congress. Obviously this drivel must be debunked. If indeed I rendered ‘unmanageable’ a BNF leadership infiltrated and hijacked by BDP agents, spies and traitors then I plead guilty to the charge. As far as I am concerned that is a complement, and not an accusation, because the BNF Constitution bestows upon every party member the right to fight against everything that is detrimental to the interest of the party.
Perhaps the most bizarre and outrageous allegation leveled against me is that my ‘utterances are either a reflection of’ my ‘tribalism’ or ‘my unbridled hatred for some people’. I don’t harbour any tribalism nor do I hate anybody. I only hate his reactionary ideas, not Gaborone the person.
As a matter of fact, I respect Gaborone as a person and my former lecturer, but respect must not be confused with agreeing with someone politically. How can I espouse socialism and at the same time harbour tribalistic ideas? Perhaps I must remind the readers that Gaborone was a prominent member of Pitso Ya Batswana ÔÇô by far the most tribally bigoted organization the country ever had which saw nothing wrong with a national constitution which entrenches Tswana hegemonism at the expense of ethnic groups which are not of Sotho-Tswana origins.
They even launched the now defunct newspaper, Mokgosi to peddle their obnoxious ideology of Tswana hegemonism. My argument is very simple ÔÇô that it was a grave error, I repeat grave error! on the part of the progressive BNF, to allow a BDP card carrying member, a feudal lord steeped in decadent and repugnant ideologies of a bygone era and a tribal chauvinist to rise to the second highest position in the party and still have the temerity and nerve to accuse the BNF of being ‘an unwelcoming organization’.
The party must have momentarily gone to sleep.
Gaborone claims that I am ‘stuck on outdated sloganeering which renders the party irrelevant to the current situation’. It is a clich├® and well-worn argument among reactionary elements in Botswana to try and portray the iniquitous system of capitalism in good light as modern and relevant, while rubbishing socialism as outdated and irrelevant. I wish to remind Gaborone that both his ideologies of feudalism and capitalism predate socialism and therefore any attempt to portray socialism as outdated flies in the face of historical reality.
Socialism is the only just system which can put an end to capitalist insatiable greed, corruption and gross inequalities in the midst of plenty. This point needs a bit of an elaboration.
What I find utterly disingenuous is the way reactionaries like Gaborone try to defend the capitalist system at a time when the whole world is reeling from or struggling to recover from the latest global capitalist crisis.
The folly of deregulation peddled by neo-liberals over the last thirty years, that the market posses some magical powers that enable it to organise productive forces efficiently and regulate itself without any intervention by the state was badly exposed and triggered-off the worst global capitalist crisis since 1929.
In the US, the citadel of capitalism, when interest rates were low and liquidity plentiful, bankers threw caution to the wind, lending billions of dollars for high margins to people who suddenly found they could not afford repayment when rates rose.
For over a decade there was a vast and reckless money-making spree and carnival. Banks invested trillions of dollars available for speculation or huge amounts of circulating or fictitious capital i.e. they tried to make money out of money without indulging in production. They invested in the housing sector and this resulted in the sub-prime mortgage crisis that helped to destabilize the global financial system.
Ironically the very imperialist banks which caused this recession were bailed out with public funds while millions of workers across the globe were laid-off and their families sentenced to needless poverty and starvation right in the midst of plenty.
Such is the iniquitous nature of capitalism that when wealthy bankers land in trouble as a result of engaging in an orgy of speculation they are bailed out with trillions of dollars from the tax payers’ money, but when workers demand basic needs they are deemed to be unrealistic and unpatriotic by the capitalist governments and their feudal hangers-on, the likes of Gaborone.
It is critically important to demystify and debunk the ideology of neo-liberalism which has failed humanity disastrously. Chang and Grabel (2004; 17 ÔÇô 230) in their book, Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Manual, point out that ‘roughly two decades of neo-liberalism have failed miserably to generate economic growth. In the industrialized countries, the annual growth rate per capita income has fallen from about 3% during the interventionist era of 1960 ÔÇô 80 to 2% during the neo-liberal era of 1980 ÔÇô 2000. Developing countries have fared even worse. Their average annual per capita income growth slowed down from 3% during 1960 ÔÇô 80 to 1.5% during 1980 ÔÇô 2000′.
The authors further point out that
‘Most disturbing is the fact that the poorest developing countries went from a modest 1.9% per capita GNP during the interventionist 1960s ÔÇô 80s to a decline of 0.5% per year in the neo-liberal era. During the neo-liberal period, Latin America has virtually stopped growing, while Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced negative growth, and many of the former Communist economies have simply collapsed. In Latin America and the Caribbean, for example, per capita GDP grew by only 7% from 1980 to 2000. By contrast, per capita GDP for the same region grew by 75% during 1960 ÔÇô 80. Data for Sub-Saharan Africa is even more startling: per capita GDP fell by about 15% during 1980 ÔÇô 2000, after having grown by 34% during 1960 ÔÇô 80′.
The failure of neo-liberalism to deliver economic growth was accompanied by enormous social costs. Premised upon the idea that government must bear minimal responsibility for social welfare, neo-liberalism led to reductions in social spending which undermined living standards. Inequalities among countries deepened. The UNDP (2001, 1999) notes that,
‘in 1960 countries with the richest 20% of the world’s populations had aggregate income 30 times that of countries with the poorest 20% of the world’s population. By 1980, at the beginning of the neo-liberal era, that ratio had risen to 45 to 1 ; by 1989, it stood at 59 to 1, by 1997, it had risen to 70 to 1′.
That means that during the neo-liberal era the inequality between the richest and the poorest countries nearly doubled. Neo-liberalism has also deepened the inequalities within countries particularly countries that fully embraced the neo-liberal ideology like the US and the UK. In the UK for instance, ‘the income share of the top 1% nearly doubled from 5.37% to 9.57% between 1979 and 1998′. And yet some self-proclaimed apostles of the capitalist system continue glorifying it as some kind of fashionable and modern system! Obviously because of his class position as a feudal lord and an admirer of the capitalist system Gaborone may never fathom these things.
