Whereas it is common knowledge that Botswana has ceased being an African success story and a model for progress and prosperity, the world is yet to readily acknowledge that life has reached a new low in Botswana.
By virtually every measure, life in Botswana has deteriorated to new lows and there is little prospect for improvement mainly because we are a society that is content with subsisting on favours from their leaders.
We are indeed a society that prides itself in behaving like domesticated elephants used by circus entertainers as much as we behave like refugees who depends on humanitarian schemes that have kept them alive, but only barely.
In nearly three decades, we have been witnessing the hardest fall in living standards, seemingly fascinated by the looting of national resources by our national leaders.
Yet, those who refused to cheer on the looters simply stood meek and silently lamented the state of our society without wanting to take responsibility to make things right.
For the longest time, our economy has been at risk of being run down by bandits backed by rented naïve jobless, idle youth who are also aspiring to become ruling party politicians precisely for the purpose of looting.
This is what you get when the economy is on a free fall. We now have created dyed-in-the-wool lice-infested praise-singers and who believe that their future lies in proudly kissing other people’s butt.
Batswana have never seen an economic implosion of this magnitude and this implosion corresponds with rising wealth for ruling party leaders mainly through the entitlement mentally that manifested itself some years ago when a senior member of the ruling party who went on to become a government minister proudly pronounced that it was their time to eat.
It is perhaps pertinent to note that the depreciation of the quality of life of the majority of our citizens is not solely a result of global forces such as pandemics, recessions and Russo-Ukrainian war.
The world has never been without wars or pandemics or recessions and it cannot be said that these crises and afflictions have amplified. In fact, according to various global indices which measure the capacity of countries to provide for the needs of their citizens, the world has become a better place.
Tellingly, Statistics Botswana has revealed that Botswana’s population is growing at a decreasing rate which, among others, means that we cannot claim that our population is growing faster than the resources that people need for their livelihoods.
Botswana still boasts of plenty of natural resources that helped to propel our economy from one of the poorest in the world in 1966 to middle income economy. While economic diversification remains a mirage, some additional revenue streams to stimulate economic growth continue to be identified and harnessed.
It therefore boggles imagination that a country so rich in natural resources and having such a small population that refuses to part with contraceptives would be failing to champion prosperity of its citizens.
There is therefore no question about the country’s resource endowment and there is no doubt about our small families and hence no doubt about the economy’s capacity to provide for its small population. There is something that we are not doing right.
It is common knowledge that the fish rots from the head. So our rot has to be traced somewhere at the top of the hierarchy.
Botswana’s fundamental problem is massive failure of leadership and any intervention that seeks to restore the country’s image as a model of prosperity and progress must deal with the leadership issue.
Perhaps it would be helpful to recall what the former chief spokesperson of the African National Congress (ANC) Smuts Ngonyama said some years ago when questioned about his unethical business conduct.
The official publicly commented that he did not join the struggle to stay poor. This was at the height of revelations that the ANC leadership was bleeding the South African economy.
In many ways, Ngonyama’s honest remarks has relevance to the state of affairs in Botswana where the ruling establishment has also stated that it is their time to eat by pencilling out deals to themselves and BDP’s loud mouths while the rest of us are condemned to feeding their snakes.
Bluntly put, the Botswana economy continues to generate massive wealth that unfortunately does not trickle down to the ordinary citizen. Using the words of Smuts Ngonyama, we can safely say that people did not join the BDP to stay poor.
This basically explains why it is profitable to be a BDP politician – the BDP has become a stock exchange that guarantees riches while a majority of citizens survive of favours from their leaders.
Mahatma Gandhi contended that the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. We expect our leaders to seek public office for the greater purpose of service to the nation.
We do not expect our national leaders to be lamenting the poor state of the global economy. Leaders seek public office fully aware of the challenges they are to deal with and for them to turn around and make lousy moans of despair is just nonsense.
Botswana has the resources and the means to harness these resources to create wealth for citizens. We only need leaders who can place the interests of the ordinary citizen ahead of theirs and all pieces will fall into place.
Botswana is not the only country hit hard by global afflictions like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war. Many countries are going through the same trails. The difference is in the leadership orientation.
Serious leaders have introduced an array of short-term relief measures to cushion the ordinary person against the economic hardships during these difficult times and it is not that they have massive wealth or idle cash to dish out willy-nilly.
It simply means that such leaders committed themselves in the service of others and always aim to do more with little, unlike ours who crave holiday homes and ranches bigger than most island countries.
Over the last decades, the quality of leadership in Botswana has deteriorated to a point where people who are known to have always been as useless as a knitted condom are appointed to leadership positions.
The irony of it all is that the decline in the quality of leadership and of the quality of life of ordinary Batswana corresponds with a steep rise in the wealth of our national leaders, suggesting that there is a correlation between our national leaders’ accumulation of massive wealth and the ordinary Motswana’s impoverishment.
It is a hard fact that most of these wealthy national leaders were basically poor before their appointments. In fact a good number of them had no other means to get rich. It is also a hard fact that our national leaders do not really enjoy the best of pay cheques.
Their appointments represented a monumental breakthrough that aided them to graduate from poverty to affluence overnight.
Leaders are tasked to manage and protect public resources and it shouldn’t be offensive to ask them to account for their ballooning weights while the ordinary Motswana is slimming involuntarily.
It is a mystery that when the ordinary Motswana’s life becomes unbearable and miserable, the leaders develop belly-size cheeks and the naturally skinny ones grow into charolais breed.
It has long been coming and the worst is yet to come unless citizens intervene. People who until yesterday were at the lowest rung of society inexplicably lead flamboyant lifestyles and surprisingly so when most of us are struggling to have three meals a day.
The little buying power that kept us smiling in spite of our misery has been wiped out by the menacing inflation. It is tough for the ordinary Motswana. The wheels are coming off and there is no indication that our leaders care.
While we applaud the government for reducing VAT on certain commodities to cushion citizens against economic hardships, there are fears that retailers had not complied especially that most goods in Botswana are free of price controls and this is rendering the relief measure futile.
Thus, there is an urgent need for tailored interventions in the form of an action plan for improving the quality of life in Botswana with emphasis on introducing measures for direct income support to protect families against income loss and unscrupulous trading practices. Our society is increasingly becoming frustrated. With youth unemployment out of control, prices of basic commodities skyrocketing, fuel prices especially the cost of diesel threatening to derail arable farming and the ability of small farmers to feed their families, the Arab Spring is beckoning.
