Nothing more than modern day highway robbers, demanding your money or your life, said the President of the Republic of Botswana, Ian Khama recently in reference to non-governmental organization, Survival International.
Survival International has of late threatened to campaign against Botswana diamonds and tourism if the government continued to deny the First People of the Kalahari (FPK) access to water within the CKGR.
For some time now, the government of Botswana has been embroiled in heated court debacles with the FPK over the issue of access to water within the CKGR. The FPK wanted permission to drill a borehole within the reserve while government maintained that for the Basarwa to get access to water and other social amenities, they would have to leave the CKGR to live in the nearby government settlements, to the dismay of the FPK.
The courts had ruled in favour of the government but the battle continues. SI has been known as the organization at the forefront for fighting for what the FPK needed, providing them with all sorts of assistance, even legal assistance.
“We are currently involved in talks with the Basarwa and I am confident that sooner rather than later, we will come to a solution and then the funding directed at SI will dry up. They only care for themselves and they use these campaigns to appeal to donors’ emotions so they may benefit from funding,” said Khama.
Khama said that SI would like to see all the socio-economic benefits from diamonds for all citizens reversed by embarking upon a campaign of lies and misinformation.
He said that the SI campaign seeks to achieve a life of backwardness for a section of Botswana’s population that appeals to the organization’s racist mentality of having people in Africa live a primitive life of deprivation, co-existing alongside wild animals as was the case in the past.
In his criticism of SI, Khama joins Minister of Environment, Tourism and Wildlife, Kitso Mokaila, who had gone on BBC where he revealed that Basarwa are still living in the dark ages and they should be introduced to civilization.
“No Motswana should exist as a tourist object to satisfy the desires of a few misguided foreigners living relatively well off with all the benefits they enjoy in a developing economy, while wanting to satisfy their fantasies by trying to influence some of our people to live a primeval life of a by-gone era of hardship and indignity,” said Khama.
He went on to add that SI’s campaign to encourage people to boycott Botswana diamonds and tourism would negatively affect the welfare of all Batswana, thus exposing the myth that they claim to care for people.
