For the umpteenth time, Transparency International has ranked Botswana the least corrupt country in Sub-Saharan Africa. For a government whose numerous erstwhile friends are beginning to doubt its democratic credentials, the feat is an accolade that quite inevitably Botswana Government has been making a huge meal out of.
Not for the first our government has taken the accolade to its head and ran with it to town. Their behavior has all the hallmarks of a little boy with a new toy. To the government media platforms the accolade has become a music hall mantra-like chorus; repeated over and over again if not for anything else, then at least to drive home the fact that notwithstanding all cases of official corruption, at least somebody outside the country still thinks of us as still good enough to be the best in Africa.
Our government’s hunger for praise verges on insanity. Its obsession with flattery is an unconscious attempt to brush aside all that is so evidently going wrong around us. Theirs is a little world of fantasy. International approval and popular acclaim is all that Botswana Government has really come to know over the years. And because we have never known criticism directed at us by other countries, responding to such criticism when it happens is something we have never learnt much less really known.
We better brace ourselves for the new era of hostile relations towards ourselves. A few days before the General Elections the Washington Post, that establishment broadsheet of the United States ran a series of articles that left my body squirming. For the first time a major western mainstream publication questioned Botswana’s democratic credentials. “Does Botswana deserve its reputation as a stable democracy?” ran one headlined which was shortly followed by a more damning one: “How the rules are privileging Botswana’s ruling party.” Across the Atlantic in London, another leading mainstream publication, The Guardian was much more ferocious:
“Trouble in paradise for Botswana’s democratic credentials,” screamed their headline. It would be foolhardy to pretend Botswana Government would have missed these portent headlines. Yet instead of addressing the concerns raised they buried their heads in the sand, hoping that no Botswana citizen would get to see them. For many westerners, news of many things that are going wrong in Botswana must have felt like a big discovery. The truth of the matter is that for over a decade now we have been a country in a decline. The global economic crisis arrived only to see us already in a fast slide down the abyss ÔÇô in full speed, as it were.
Thought infinitely economic, that decline had both moral as well as political origins. Tragically our government has opted to turn the other way and pretend all is well. They wait for pointedly misleading indices like that often parroted by Transparency International. It has the whiff of a dying patient who prods the doctor to say, against all evidence that they will be cured in just a few days. Unless we accept that we are a broken society and stop reminiscing about our splendid past, we will never reach our full potential much less regain our past hilarious glory. Unless we disregard the flattery occasionally heaped on us by Transparency International and deal with the painful and unvarnished realities currently eating our society we can forget about achieving those things that we see many countries effortlessly achieving.
As a country we have had a glorious past. It has been a story of rags to riches which reached its peak in the 1980s making its way through a long streak that went all the way to the late 1990s. But that now is all history beyond which has been brazenly long periods of stagnation interrupted only by tantalizingly short-lived interludes of what often felt like recovery only to descend again and again into painful realities of false dawns.
The good old days are gone. And from the look of things, probably for good. Invoking those good old days is nothing short of hyperbolic nostalgia. At times it smacks of outright insanity and delusion as when our government ministers try to prove great swaths of progress made by their party by reminding us that before independence the country had no more than five kilometers of tarred road and no more than twenty college graduates. Going forward nobody is really going to measure ours success using the yardstick of past success. Our future success as a country is going to be measured, determined and ultimately judged by the manner at which we are able to respond to current challenges and present situations. In the face of the public anger at clear instances of corruption, our Government keeps telling us that things certainly can’t really be so bad afterall; “If in doubt just check with Transparency International,” they seem to be saying.
Transparency International has been a bad influence for Botswana. In the last four to five years, our cabinet has at any given moment consistently and without fail housed at least one corruption accused. Transparency International does not seem to have recognized this fact. If it has, then the organization has not bothered to factor it in its odd findings. This is why a growing number of Batswana think Transparency International is a joke; an organization that does not deserve to be taken seriously because it has on its own turned itself into a laughing stock.
Everyday our people see real incidents not perceptions of crime, yet year in and year out, some overseas organization, after interviewing a few faceless members of the elite who are themselves beneficiaries if not practitioners of corruption keeps trying to persuade us, against all evidence that we are the best afterall, when compared with the rest of black Africans. It has become a silly little joke.
