From early on even as I questioned the true motives of the strike, it was my decided opinion that the striking public servants stood no chance against the frenzy of the State House.
It was my opinion, publicly communicated at the time, that the strike action was a long shot in the dark, a huge gamble that was likely to end up not only in failure but with many broken hearts.
And so it was to be.
From early on, a decision had been taken that the leader’s position had to be defended at all costs, whatever it took – and that included transforming the state media into a poodle.
Right from the beginning, Botswana television reporters were under strict instructions to set all ethics aside, abandon all sense of fairness and proportion as they climbed on a tidal wave of scoring points against perceived government opponents.
It was also part of that strategy that not an inch of ground would be yielded ÔÇô not by government negotiators and certainly not by government lawyers. And so it was ÔÇô until the end.
Botswana has never had a shortage of strong willed presidents, but for the first time in a long time, we have a leader who wields a passionate and righteous indignation that state resources must be deployed to defend his own personal values.
The upshot of it all is that many people no longer turn to state media as a source of credible news.
What a spectacular own goal!
It would look like the operational planners at the Office of the President, including those who bizarrely relish calling themselves journalists, had forgotten the golden rule that, for the media, credibility is the only stock in trade.
Once credibility flies out of the window, everything else follows.
Officially, the strike action is over, but rather than die out it has only gone underground, more like guerrilla insurgency.
To tell the truth, the strike action is still very much with us, very much a part of our daily existence. Only this time it is uncoordinated, unofficial and potentially much more deadly.
Any trained soldier will tell you that fighting an irregular armed enemy formation is much more difficult than confronting a regular army.
In a guerilla warfare, not only is the enemy and his tactics invisible, they also are often more determined and more ruthless.
With the strike officially over, Government no longer has BOFEPUSU to blame for everything that goes wrong. And yet everything is going terribly wrong.
While schools are open, there is no teaching nor learning that goes on.
While officials clock for duty every morning at all Government centres, the truth of the matter is that not anything much substantive goes on inside those offices.
There is an undeclared go slow at almost all the government offices.
It is a façade of normalcy that betrays everything that is badly wrong underneath.
Every other day we have to contend with wildcat-like uprisings by students in schools across the country who complain that the end of the strike has not brought teachers back into the classrooms.
For many public servants who felt the humiliation at the hands of an unyielding government, at least a consolation prize of rough justice now prevails. Government is paying a much higher price by fighting an enemy nobody can see.
BOFEPUSU can no longer be the scapegoat that government used to feed into its propaganda items.
Officially, the strike is over, but practically, and by all intents and purposes the strike continues ferociously and unabated.
Heartlessness rather than attachment to economic austerity lingers from the fall out.
It is a feeling unlikely even to be extinguished by a hefty and opportunistic pay rises ahead of a general election.
Together with the assertion that Botswana will never be the same again, this is the historic context we must attach as a footnote to the two months strike the after effects of which we will feel for much longer.
We must never forget the simple but significant point that the strike action began with something unworthy of the outcome we ultimately got.
The unions were all too eager to negotiate, while Government, nay, the leader was from beginning to the end unavailable to anyone he suspected held a view dissimilar to his.
To this day, he is still to meet a delegation of members of parliament.
Barack Obama, our leader’s much more powerful lookalike in the United States, meets members from the opposition on a daily basis, officially and informally, to strength ties and working relations across the divide.
In our case, we have a leader who chastises the conduct of other African leaders but behaves and acts more like an archetypal, textbook African leader than many of them.
As we speak he cannot meet the parliamentary delegation because amongst the MPs is one the leader particularly does not love.
We are compelled to ask an awkward question: “What kind of leader is this?”
