Keeping together an open and democratic nation is by all measures a massive undertaking. It is expensive, irritating and infinitely expensive.
It takes flexibility, determination and above all adherence to basic principles, chief of which is accepting everybody’s bonafides, including those who steadfastly hold and pronounce views opposite to yours.
Existing with such people is never easy. But such is the price one has to always pay for democracy, openness and tolerance. Since time immemorial, then instinct for mankind has always been to take an easy root of dictatorship.
But history has time after time proved that mankind ÔÇô regardless of their religion, background or creed, always clamours for more freedoms, not less. As a united country, Botswana has over the last fifty years faced challenges. We must always thank our founders.
At a time when it was fashionable to adopt one-party-systems, they gleefully chose multi-party system. At a time when the African continent was held under a grip of civil wars and civil strife, our forbearers worked tirelessly for national unity.
It was not an easy task. And in the end it was certainly not a perfect result.
But they managed to put through the paces, strong foundations of a robust, modern, open and democratic state. As a state, Botswana was founded on ideals of tolerance, co-existence and acceptance of opposite and opposing views. Fifty years down the line, as a people we seem to be straying away and away from those ideals.
Instead of broadening, our public space seems to be shrinking by the day.
It would be foolhardy to blame it all on Government. As individuals we should shoulder some blame. We have become prickly and overly sensitive to criticism. We are impatient to engage in dialogue and too quick to shout each other down. In an era of social media this growing attitude seems easy and expedient. But in the long-term it will erode what we achieved and also the qualities that have given us the tag of exceptionalism.
Our public discourse has become polarised, toxic and even contaminated.
The social media is easily the greatest invention since the locomotive train. As a mode of communication, social media is cheaper, swift and far reaching. It has opened up the space of communication and allowed the public to communicate with themselves and with those in power in a way never before possible. But by far the greatest attribute of social media is that it has liberated communication by giving more power to ordinary people and taking it away from formal platforms like the media and indeed officialdom.
Those good elements of social media can only be realized if social media is not abused. The truth though is that when not used properly, social media can be a source of all evil.
Some of the world’s most vicious terrorist movements and their sypathisers have been able to instill fear and harm on humanity because of their skills at harnessing the media.
In Botswana, rather than being a force for good, social media has been warped by a majority of its users into an ugly weapon. Many people in Botswana use the social media not to debate issues, but to malign their enemies or those they perceive as such.
In its various derivatives, the social media is used to hound other people, belittle and humiliate them forcing some of the thinner skinned to altogether cease use of the platforms.
This cannot be acceptable.
Unfortunately the interventions suggested by Government are less helpful. In sum, the laws as suggested by Government amount to policing of public discourse in the manner last at the Soviet Union at the heart of that empire’s dark days.
We need at individual levels to accept that opposing views, held and aired by other people, however divergent from those we hold are legitimate. Government for their part should not try to foster a false sense of conformity of ideas under a pretext of national unity.
Sadly, at the moment we have a Government wedded to a thinking that views opposed to them are less patriotic, divisive and worse ÔÇô even treasonous. As a country we need to encourage healthy disagreements, healthy debates and even dissonance.
That is the best and surest way to achieve national unity in a democracy.
In democracies the world over, national unity is fostered and ultimately achieved by allowing free expression of a widest spectrum of diverse ideas however uncomfortable such ideas to those in power. As dictatorships have often so painfully discovered, in modern days suppressing alternative views is not only expensive but ultimately impossible to achieve.
Casting aspersions on other people, and even going as far as to question not only their motives, but also integrity simply because they hold other views can hardly be acceptable in an open democracy such as ours.
