Gaborone based lawyer Martin Dingake of Dingake Law Partners has said a crisis of leadership is to blame for the current troubles besieging the judiciary.
Speaking in a brief interview, Dingake noted that “It seems to me that in all spheres of our life and within the body polity, we have a serious crisis of leadership.”
That restoration, Dingake said, “may take longer than we can imagine, it requires a restructuring of the Administration of Justice, appointment process that are open and transparent, applied to all structures without discrimination.”
“One truly hopes that the much-touted constitutional review is reflective of these ethos and our values as a nation,” he said. Dingake added that “No institution or organization is immune from this phenomenon.”
The lawyer observed that, “The judiciary’s greatest capital, it may interest you to know, is public confidence. Once that confidence is eroded, there is very little that remains of it.”
Dingake was commenting on recent allegations by Justice Gaolapelwe Ketlogetswe and Kgosi Mosadi Seboko that there is interference by the executive.
“I think it is important to say that these remain allegations, hopefully to be tested in the fullness of time. This notwithstanding, of greater concern is the fact these allegations could be made in relation to our judiciary, and coming from such eminent members of our society, some of who are part of the judiciary,” said Dingake.
He further stated that; “It is fair to say, where we are now, that except for those who may be averse to the truth and are willfully blind, there is no denying that we entered a winter of despair, in Dickensian terms, called the age of foolishness and a season of literal and figurative darkness.”
“Antonio Gramsci must have had in mind such a situation when he wrote in Prison Notebooks that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” he said.
