I do not think that I am wrong to say that a lot of people believed, at one point or other, that Rre Khama was going to be a very good president. Some have even suggested that he has squandered the opportunity to be Botswana’s best president. Some of our most influential commentators have likewise judged his performance against the prior belief that he would be a good president.
It is generally believed that he commands a lot of goodwill from the general public in the urban areas. I think he also commands a lot of goodwill from the rural areas. I am well aware that he has a significant number of detractors.
I remember reading an article where Rre Sydney Pilane remarked that he was aware of the fact that Rre Khama can be a better president than what he is showing the nation.
What I find particularly strange about this state of affairs is that we do not seem to have placed a cost on any change in position. When I was chairman of the Association of Citizen Development Consultants, we used to try to educate our government on the dangers of tendering and the positives of commissioning Batswana to undertake government works.
In our view tendering made people focus on the money side of issues whilst commissioning promoted duty and service.
We used to argue that the British practice of the Elizabethan era whereat people were commissioned to design bridges and works of art promoted duty and service to the crown.
We used to suggest that a citizen who is called by a president and asked to design a bridge will understand this as a calling whilst a citizen who wins a tender to design a bridge will look at the cost and profit equation. Our point was that the British were not born with a higher sense of duty than our people. They had however used practices that socialized their people into what resulted in a sense of duty.
Much as I was against the public sector strike on economic grounds I have revisited the positions we used to take when advocating a for citizen economic empowerment and tried to apply the same to understanding the strike. Because of government’s tendency in the past to talk about costs we have developed a people who have subordinated service to cost. We have developed a people who cost their labour rather than a people who see themselves as serving their nation.
Our governments prior to Rre Khama nurtured this type of citizen. We have developed a citizen who focuses on money instead of service. For the current government to try to turn people from this position is going to take a lot of effort and determination. What I am suggesting is that Rre Khama is stuck with the results of a socialization process of previous BDP governments. His ascendancy triggered the exposure of this characteristic of our new citizen.
Our parents were socialized to serve. The emergence of the economists as leaders of the new nation resulted in economic attributes taking precedence.
Our government’s position that there is no money for a public sector wage increase and for development projects, is informed by the dominance of economists in government thinking. To pretend that it is only Rre Khama who is the problem is to fail to look at the historical attributes of leadership in Botswana.
When he first came on board Rre Khama dared change the dominance of economist in the development process. He later chickened out. I have in the past suggested that he had been told something by our economists that made him change his mind.
Because I am an outsider I can only speculate. I think when he was faced with an upheaval in his party and a resurgent opposition he decided to limit his battles. He lost his nerve.
I have observed that Rre Khama has the capacity to emerge stronger and bigger out of a skirmish. When he went on a sabbatical soon after being made Vice President some suggested that he was finished. Instead he came back more powerful than when he left.
When he was taken to court by Rre Motswaledi he emerged out of the skirmish more powerful for now there was certainty as to his immunity. In the recent public sector strike I believe his emerged the stronger.
There are only a few instances where he went into a skirmish and emerged weakened. The one instance that readily comes to mind was the attempt to sue the Sunday Standard newspaper. That is the only time that I can recall when Rre Khama was made to bow. At the heart of his defeat lay a proper grounding on what the issues at hand were about on the part of the Sunday Standard and its lawyers. The nation is yet to grasp the significance of that defeat.
I believe the defeat made a change in Rre Khama that drove him towards maintaining the status quo in terms of economic power. The result favours private capital and old money. That is why the BDP finds nothing wrong with failure to find an indigenous Motswana with a farm near Gaborone where the President and BDP Members of Parliament can go for lunch. In a country where the leadership cannot sense the indignity in being unable to find an indigenous Motswana who has a farm near the capital city to hold a lunch meeting, one cannot see how Batswana can be asked to be patriotic.
What I am driving at is that as a people we sometimes have to cost out conflicts and differences. If we elect someone president and then spend an inordinate amount of energy fighting that person, what do we achieve in the end?
In my view those foreigners who control our economy are the greatest beneficiaries of a president under siege. Placing a president under inordinate pressure also means that he spends a lot of energy fending us off instead of serving us. The foreign contingent then takes advantage by presenting itself as his protector.
I am not suggesting that we should not differ with the president or that we should not voice those differences in the strongest possible terms. I am suggesting that sometimes we need to invest in calm to get results.
I am suggesting that we have nothing to lose by giving Rre Khama a breather. In that state of calm we can meet as a people and exclude the foreign contingent. I believe that we need to bring in Rre Khama from the cold. We must look at him as an asset that we can exploit to assert our independence.
I have told some of my colleagues that I see leaders as instruments or resources that I can deploy to achieve certain results. Our tendency to subordinate our capacity to think and propagate views, to those of leaders, results in a situation where those who position themselves as leaders define what we can achieve as a people.
I take the position that we were in the same classes as most of these people and they were no better gifted than us. Why then must we allow them to determine issues on which we are better informed than them?
In my view we have every right to tell party political leaders to keep quite for a little while to allow us some space to work together. They can later indulge in their favourite subject of throwing accusations about. The way we are going about our politics is with respect wasteful.
We need political parties to spend their energies formulating strategies for the solution to the complex issues at hand. If the current government is failing to satisfy us, we do not need someone to come and tell us of the same.
We are well aware of what is happening in our lives. Telling me that my government is giving works to Chinese contractors instead of me is not a solution to my problem.
We need to seriously ask for quality in our politics. The current situation, where all one needs to do to be seen to be a supporter of democracy, is to call the current president a dictator is, with due respect, cheap politics. It allows mediocre politicians to dominate the political space. We need serious politicians who can compete with politicians from China and the United States in securing our peoples interests.
We do not seem to have the capacity sit still for a while.
Some have even suggested that it feels like we are in an election year. We are failing to exploit the resource that is Rre Khama.
If he could be made to bow by being properly prepared and informed on the issues at hand, as demonstrated by the Sunday Standard issue, I see no reason why he cannot be made to do the same on any relevant issue.
I have even heard it from those who have interacted with him that contrary to popular myth, he does listen.
