Two ordinary people share my nomination for the 2012 Person of the Year Award.
They couldn’t be more different from each other ÔÇô not only in gender. One is a police sergeant whose jurisdiction covers my neighbourhood, and the other a computer science engineer who works in the telecommunications industry and regularly travels on the continent doing consultancy work for an international firm.
Please meet my heroes for 2012, Sergeant Tuelo Lerothodi and Motlhaleemang Moalosi.
Lerothodi walked into our lives at the beginning of this year to introduce the concept of community policing in the part of town where I live. She found a community in which neighbours were virtual strangers from each other. In less than a year, the transformation has been incredible. We have seen walls come down, friendships being made, and the emergence of a community spirit that was previously unknown. Where once “hellos” were hurriedly exchanged, if at all, there is time for real conversation and afternoon tea with home-baked cookies. The crowning moment happened slightly over two weeks back when we converged for a farewell dinner at the house of one of our own on the eve of his departure to take up a diplomatic posting outside the country. If he had left exactly 12 months earlier, I doubt any of the neighbours would have made the dinner guest list.
In all fairness, this wonderful story wouldn’t have occurred if Lerothodi had not found willing and eager partners within the community, who not only decided to give the idea a try, but took the ball and ran with it all the way. Where she takes the credit is that she had the courage to plant a seed in an area that had often exhibited characteristics of barren land.
So why do I think she deserves special mention in a national newspaper? Two reasons. Firstly, we live in an era of grumpy service providers ÔÇô in both the public service and the private sector ÔÇô who think to serve a customer is to do them a favour.
We have all had our nice little encounters with public officers who complain that the clock is moving too slowly for their liking, and supermarket cashiers who nick your change in the hope that you won’t check it. We are a nation that reports to our workstations each morning just so that we are not marked absent. To meet someone who still takes pride in the old fashioned values of dedication to duty and service to one’s community is not only a rarity, but a cause for celebration as well. Here is someone who has not only given her mobile number to every household in the neighbourhood, but has virtually instructed us to call her anytime we encounter a situation that demands a cop’s attention. She has attended to some of our queries while on leave. She, more than anybody else, and that’s my second reason for writing about her, has restored my pride in the uniform of the Botswana Police Service.
If Santa Claus were not a hoax, I would ask for many more Tuelo Lerothodis in the public service. But I know better ÔÇô and part of what I know is that Botswana is a country in which everything that can break is broken ÔÇô politicians’ promises, roads, street lights, and the public education system. As for the public healthcare system, it’s on life support in the ICU. And the biggest tragedy is that we bear the humiliation in silence.
Courtesy of my friend and brother Keto Segwai, I recently read David Lamb’s book The Africans. In one chapter, he writes about how we, Black Africans, have this puzzling tendency to just go with the flow without demanding an explanation. Whether the phone doesn’t work, or the government official shows up an hour late for an appointment, or the plane doesn’t leave at the scheduled time, it’s ok. We just won’t make a scene.
“He (The African, that is) will wait quietly in line for three or four hours to pay his water bill…..He will queue all day at a hospital to see a doctor and move on without a word of protest ÔÇô to return the next day ÔÇô when told the doctor isn’t seeing any more patients.”
This quotation is based on Lamb’s experience in West Africa, but if it sounds disconcertingly familiar, it’s because it also speaks of us – Batswana.
If, indeed, the meek shall inherit the kingdom of heaven, then all the 2 million of us ÔÇô minus a few hotheads ÔÇô are destined for eternal life. Our docility knows no bounds.
As I write, this year’s results for the Primary School Leaving Examinations are not yet out, and parents couldn’t be bothered ÔÇô probably happy with the promise posted on the website of the Botswana Examination Council that the results will be ready for publication on December 17.
Now if the national examining body cannot get its head around primary school examinations, can we trust it to handle senior secondary school examinations ÔÇô and deliver credible results? But, of course, we don’t ask such questions. We are Batswana; we just go with the flow.
Well, such days may be coming to an end ÔÇô and that brings me to my second hero for this year, Motlhaleemang Moalosi.
Moalosi is the founder of a Facebook group called Petition to the Minister of Lands and Housing, which has been gathering signatures to petition government about the non-availability of land for citizens. Aged just 32, for me Moalosi represents a new generation of Batswana who are prepared to hold leaders to account. In his initiative I see the makings of a new movement of citizen activists.
For far too long, we have been happy to take part in the political process just once every five years. We vote, and then give the politicians a blank and signed cheque ÔÇô and boy, do they use it! Then we complain behind closed doors that the streetlights have not worked for six months.
It’s a very queer arrangement where the boss (us) is tossed about by the servants (the politicians). It beats me how we fail to draw lessons from elsewhere on the continent, where concerned citizens often engage in concerted action to direct national agenda. If you ask people here what they believe to be wrong with our political framework, they would invariably say it’s the fact that the opposition is weak. Unfortunately, that is way off the mark. I will tell you what the problem is. The problem is that the citizens are weak, and they are weak because they are ignorant of the power they wield.
For some reason, a notion has been allowed to take hold that politicians have to provide the answers and the direction, while the people will only provide the votes and taxes. Well, it is a false proposition, and young people such as Moalosi are fast seeing through the fallacy.
The beauty of it is that as more Moalosis see the value of citizen activism we will be able to defeat the twin scourges of powerlessness and cynicism, and begin to demand accountability from those we entrust with our national affairs. And when that happens, the trickle-down effect is that the parasites will be shed from our public offices ÔÇô and in their place we will have more Lerothodis. Now, that’s the Botswana I want to bequeath to my children.
