Response to the State of the Nation Address by Phenyo Butale- MP for Gaborone Central 19 November 2014 Madam speaker let take this opportunity to thank you for the chance to make this inaugural address to this august house. Allow me to echo the apt words of my leader, the people’s president His Excellency Duma Gideon Boko, and pay tribute to a great son of this soil, an honourable man who if it was not for the evil forces that connived to deprive this nation of his eloquence and leadership, i have no doubt that Gomolemo Thatayaone ‘Sir G’ Motswaledi would be standing where the present speaker is standing and he was no doubt going to illuminate this house with well researched debates, at the heart of which was going to be nothing but the interest of his people. Go sena polotiki ya matomo, ya bolope le go ithokomolosa bosula le tshiamolola ka tsholohelo ya go atswiwa ka maemonyana kana go lathelelwa leraponyana wa kokona. Let me start by thanking the brave and visionary people of Gaborone Central for leading the revolt against Khama’s misrule. Allow me to thank them, together with their counterparts across the country for frowning upon the Khama led dictatorship that continues to masquerade as a democracy, while at the same time defiling the core principles of democracy such as the respect for the sanctity of the separation of powers that provide for the independence of parliament. The evidence of the attempt by the president and his aides to undermine this independence manifested itself through the recent mischievous, devilish if you like, case that sort to declare parliamentary standing orders unconstitutional and allow the executive to prescribe to the legislature how to conduct its business. We demand to know as Batswana how much tax payers’ money was wasted in this case and the president needs to account for this wastage. It is therefore unfortunate the same president who presided over this onslaught, has the audacity to claim the title of a democrat. He seeks to hoodwink the unsuspecting nation into believing that he subscribes to the rule of law when he unashamedly and arbitrarily pardoned and reinstated the killers of Kalafatis as if to reward them for carrying out his instructions to his satisfaction. Allow me madam speaker to state from the onset that President Khama’s address was uninspiring, divisive and self-congratulatory as i have come to expect of president Khama. I wish to highlight the glaring omissions in the speech. The president chose to ignore issues around freedom of expression which is foundational to any democracy and facilitative in that, it is through it that citizens of this republic can enjoy any other right. This understanding of this right which was recognised by the very first UN meeting seems to still elude president Khama and his administration who continue to trample upon media freedom, academic freedom, the right to access information, freedom association and the right to hold an opinion and share it. Censorship and intimidation is the order of the day in our academic institutions where professors and other lectures are harassed and hurled before disciplinary committees for doing their jobs. The university of Botswana staff, who I met last week, put before me, numerous cases of intimidation and harassment that amount to daylight defilement of academic freedom. Two distinguished, world celebrated professors resigned from the new BIUST University citing related issues. What kind of a country is this that does not value professors, fountains of knowledge? How can we aspire a world class system of education when academics are censored and even deported for doing their jobs? It is common course that journalists are arrested and victimised in this country and the private press is a sworn enemy of the state president who in his address, instead of recognising the role they have played in exposing rampant corruption and looting of state resources, he chooses to attack the private media and reprimanding them for not spin doctoring the truth and showering him with undeserved accolades that presents him as a messiah, as is now the norm at the state media. As a result of this disdain for the media, Botswana prides herself as the only country in all modern democracies with a president that never address press conferences, he even went to the extent of abolishing the practice of holding joint press conferences with visiting heads of states therefore depriving the nation of the much needed information that can allow the citizenry to meaningfully hold those in power accountable. Khama presided over the defeat by this parliament of a progressive piece of legislation that sought to give Batswana access to information choosing secrecy over transparency and adding to a plethora of media unfriendly laws such as the Media practitioners Act and Bocra. The former law is draconian in that it seeks to accredit journalists while the latter reversed the gains made towards transformation of state media into public service media under the international minimum standard of a three tier system. Speaking of accountability; or lack thereof, it is opportune for me to state for the record that the impunity and lack of accountability that runs across the current regime emanates from the leadership style of the president. I wish to opine that in as much as Khama needs to be accountable to Batswana through a free and unfettered press, he should be accountable to Batswana through parliament. We were told that President Khama is a member of parliament and he attended parliament religiously when he wanted to vote and intimidate his Mps into voting for certain people, and i wish to state that my view is that president Khama should not only come to parliament to speak down to us and disappear, he needs to attend parliament, we need to have a question and answer session where he will account to this house and be a true member of this house. I wish to state for the record that as a parliamentary democracy, Botswana recognises the oversight role of parliament and the president as head of the executive should subject himself to parliament and account to us. The current arrangement is an affront to democracy, a deformity that promotes a culture of impunity and secrecy that is currently plaguing our country. Khama needs to come to this house to account for the many unfinished projects whose costs of construction continues to balloon. I wish to alert this house that we have mortgaged the future of our children through the loans acquired from international lenders such as the African development Bank and World Bank to fund projects like Morupule B which continue to gobble up money while the nation suffers almost daily power cuts. Khama needs to account for the sluggish progress towards economic diversification and beneficiation which are now becoming a song with monotonous lyrics. We need seriousness, we need laws such as beneficiation act to ensure progress towards ensuring that every raw material that is produced in this country is added value before exportation. My general criticism of the president’s speech is its failure to make an appraisal of past promises and pronouncements made in previous speeches. There is no reference to sweeping and often unrealistic statements on bread and butter issues. I wish to give an example of this by referring to the president inaugural speech where he promises the nation that he was going to elevate the economic position of Botswana from middle income to a high income country. Like John F Kennedy who made a watershed pronouncement that he will place a man on the moon in 10 years, president Khama undertakes to i quote “to transform Botswana into a high income economy that ensures the well-being of all Batswana”. This is a monumental undertaking for which we need feedback from the president on the progress or lack thereof towards this goal. How far are we towards this, if we on track at all, because the tendency under the current administration is to play government with the lives of Batswana, trying policy interventions that have not been well thought out only to abandon them without making any assessment of why they failed. The boot camp is a case in point. I wish to turn to the issue of poverty which has once again been presented with amazing inaccuracy and lack of appreciation of the complexities and nuances that surrounds the subject of poverty. The reckless pronouncements made by the president that he intends to eradicate poverty while not showing a full appreciation of the concept can best be answered by Zimbabwean author Chenjerai Hove in his book ‘Bones’ where he opines that “ Poverty is worse than war. You can stop war by talking, but you cannot stop poverty by talking”. No amount of self-congratulation can erase the growing poverty among our people. The growing figures of beneficiaries of social safety nets and stuff like ipelegeng, bear testimony to this fact. I am reminded of poet D.H Lawrence who aptly defines poverty as an ‘old hag, when you are pinched for absolute necessity’. I wish to challenge Khama and his government to modernise their understanding of development. I wish to remind them that development has long ceased to be about mathematical estimations and gradations, like Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen aptly opines, ‘development is all about capacitating people to live lives that they deem meaningful’ which means that poverty will be viewed as ‘capacity deprivation’. We need to move away from old fashioned welfare economics that typically conflate well-being with opulence (income). Shortage of accommodation for teachers in Maoka and SSG(where three families share a 3 bedroomed house), the unhealthy pit-latrines- all these would be overlooked if well-being is equated to having a few thebes in ones pockect. The people of Maruapula, Notwane, Boikhutso, Segoditshane, the budding youth at the university and the professionals and pensioners at government ward, they do not need hand-outs or diphaphata, they need to be capacitated to realise their dreams. They may be poor materially but they are not poor mentally- they have ideas, they have dreams and aspiration that go way beyond the myopic grass cutting scope of ipelegeng and other programs under what the president calls ‘temporary relief’. Engage our people and hear what assistance they require instead of coming with one size fits all solutions. They live through the deprivation every day and do not need any lectures, nyeletso lehuma workshops where millions are spent on officials camping out of their duty stations, akin to a festival celebration of our people’s problems which often culminate into an expose of sorts, with our parents and relatives paraded on national television as they scrumble for hand outs from the messiah. I wish to link the issue of poverty with the tendency by the president to seek refuge in foreign surveys to legitimise his misrule. Our lived realities under this tyrannical regime can never be delegitimized by some survey done in the Western world. We know what we talking about, we witnessed the killing of kalafatis, we saw the arrest of Outsa Mokone and the fleeing of his colleague; my brothers and sisters at BTV and RB1 share with me everyday the tyranny they live under, with the leadership of a BDP functionary who has succeeded in turning that government resource into a sorry sight. To borrow the words of renowned writer Chinua Achebe “Batswana are not some experiment in some imaginary laboratory madam speaker, Batswana are people, who can give the president feedback on his performance if he stops shunning the platforms through which he can interact with them. I wish to end by speaking to colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Honourable men and women who stood before multitudes of their people and pledged to fight for the developmental needs of their areas. It is a pity the same people are now glued to their chairs because the master has not sanctioned them to speak or better still the master has not told them what to say and what not to say. Therefore in fear of upsetting the master they would rather keep mum. I wish to end by putting to you that if you cringe before an injustice and if you cringe before an unjust man, you yourself become unjust and dishonourable.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 22:05:35 +0000
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