Our country has progressively degenerated into a theatre of madness.
We are a broken people living in a broken country that has stumbled from one calamity to the other.
Every time we think we had reached rock bottom, something really bad happens, and it suddenly dawns on us that we actually had been better off before.
In short all calamities that befall us always prove progressively worse than all the ones preceding.
It is a litany of catastrophes that would bring any nation on its knees.
At the moment we are shocked at what is happening with our judiciary. For many there cannot be anything worse than what is unfolding. But that belief will only hold true until the next tragedy strikes, which you can all be sure, will not be in a long time.
In the mist of all that is bad going around us, it is important to retain hope.
There is no doubt that our institutions have been soiled, if not obliterated.
It is however important to believe that what damage has been done is not irreparable.
We must work at restoring our institutions.
It will be a painstaking process, but it can be done.
The starting point must be restoring the public respect of the Presidency and all that it stands for.
The integrity and dignity of the Presidency has over the last few years taken a battering.
Instead of respecting the institution, people fear it.
Instead of uniting us, the presidency has been a dividing instrument.
Instead of being proud at what the office is doing, people are disdainful of it.
Where the people used to hold the office in high esteem, they now perceive it as a source of all that is wrong with our country.
The current occupant of that office has been woefully inadequate and wanting in many respects.
He is instinctively divisive, and excessively partisan ÔÇô a thoroughgoing non-believer when it comes to the universally held basic tenets of democracy.
All available evidence points to the fact that President Ian Khama does not care much about unemployment which is by the way the root cause of the poverty he pretends to hate.
He claims to have a heart for the poor, while adopting policies that are almost all designed to benefit and empower the footloose corporate world of his beloved tourism sector ÔÇô dominated by the expatriate white community that makes up more than half his core inner circle.
All the past promises we have heard from the leader about fighting poverty, creating jobs, and strengthening the private sector have not gone past the podiums from where these vague pronouncements are often made; no action and no delivery.
An ongoing haphazard suite of schemes to create jobs for the young people who are by far the worst affected by prevailing circumstances would be a laughing matter were it not of the tragedy it all has become on the lives of these young souls.
First we learnt that government was going to reintroduce a latter day version of Tirelo Sechaba ÔÇô a voluntary scheme that the President had stopped while he still fancied himself a rainmaker – under which participants would be paid about P500. Shortly thereafter we learnt that young people are being called to line up to get special licenses to transport the public.
All these schemes are so manifestly half-baked that the inevitable question that comes to everybody’s mind is to ask just where our cabinet.
The Office of the President symbolizes all that is broken in our society.
The office’s self-defeating refusal to engage those sections of society it felt uncomfortable around has been enduring. A refusal to engage the academia and the middle class explains the reason why we have these shallow initiatives.
Our government, as epitomized by the Office of the President does not want to engage because it does not want to live with the consequences of public awareness of its weaknesses.
As we approach fifty years of independence due next year, it is clear that that there are subliminal efforts to divide the country into those deemed patriotic and those defined as unpatriotic.
This is a thin thread seemingly designed to blackmail all of us into rallying around the flag.
But given the extent to which our society has been polarised, that strategy might prove even more counterproductive.
To achieve unity and hope as a people again, we need to take one step at a time.
And that means starting at rebuilding the very institution that symbolises our state.
The Office of President has been sapped of all the integrity and dignity that are necessarily for it to be a glue that binds us together.
It is idle to suppose that things will on their own turn right unless we bring back dignity and integrity to the country’s top most institution.
