THE RESPONSE OF THE BOTSWANA NATIONAL FRONT TO THE STATE OF THE NATION ADDRESS

Ladies and gentlemen of the Press, fellow citizens and guests, let me gratefully acknowledge your presence here, one and all, and welcome you to this press conference. It is the first of many that I and the current leadership of the Botswana National Front will hold in the course of carrying out our mandate to the party as well as our obligations to the nation.

This particular press conference has a specific purpose. We are here to speak to the pressing challenges facing our nation ; to seek and locate the root causes of the calamities that choke our people and degrade their existence. We are here to slash through smokescreens ; to scale and break down the consolidated walls of denial constructed in successive phases of Botswana Democratic Party leadership. We are here to tear down walls maintained and reinforced through stealth, by the leadership of President Kgama, more poignantly in his State of the Nation Address delivered yesterday. We are here to attest, that the minerals and wealth of this country ; its diamonds ; have only a spurious glitter for the vast majority of our people.

We are here, as the Botswana National Front to reaffirm that we take a human rights based approach to the challenge of development. And we are fortified in our stance by the knowledge that our position is sound and impregnable. We note with pride that all progressive streams of thought and action narrow down and converge on this stance that we in the Botswana National Front have not only articulated but enshrined in our constitution. If you seek handy examples of this convergence we would refer you to the Human Development Report of 2000 prepared by UNDP. It confirms our position. It vindicates the substance of our stance ! We are here, ladies and gentlemen, to present and represent our response to President Kgama’s State of the Nation Address.

It is important for me to inform you that although I have not engaged in any fireside “democracy”, I have travelled, the breadth and dimensions of this country over the last few months. I have come face to face with staggering manifestations of poverty. I have inhaled the stench of aborted lives, shattered dreams and broken ambitions. I must state upfront, that I had my fair share of firesides as a child growing up in Mahalapye and having to walk long distances barefooted to access schools far from where my folks eked out a living. Unlike others, I do not need fireside schooling in what poverty looks and feels like. I have lived it and I am able to understand, and empathize with, our people. I know what it means to live the life of exilic marginality that the majority of our people are consigned to. Much more importantly, I am unwavering in my resolve to work with the people to find lasting solutions to the tragic blunders of our present government. Our people are becoming increasingly agitated and frustrated by the sub human conditions they have endured and must continue to endure under this regime.

Make no mistake, the Botswana National Front has a purchase on the loyalty of a sizeable chunk of the national vote. This it defended even when it was under internal strife. In the capacity of President of this organisation, I have the singular honour of being the trumpet voice of the hundreds of thousands of its members. I am the custodian, if you will, of their fury and frustrations. I feel their grief ; I feel their anguish ! And my appeal to President Kgama is, help me canalize this anger and despair of our people. Give me reasons to keep their faith in the efficacy of our democratic processes and institutions. Give me a reason, please, to assure them that you and your government are not merely engaged in a predatory conspiracy to humiliate and dehumanise them. Help me. Work with me here Mr. President. Work with me to ensure that we do not experience a volcanic eruption of their discontent, fuelled by the arrogance of your bureaucrats and the unresponsiveness of your entire administrative apparatus.

The State of the Nation Address affords a unique opportunity for the President of our Republic to speak, across party lines, to the nation and to the world. It should, therefore, be a moment of requiem and reappraisal ; a moment of solemn intensity. It imposes an abiding obligation of candour and honesty. It saddens me to have to say that in yesterday’s State of the Nation Address the President missed the opportunity to reconnect with the people and speak to their immediate issues. He failed to transcend the barriers of partisan defensiveness and present a candid outlook on the state of our nation. In so doing he fed and furthered the impression that his government is but just a comedy of terror.

In responding to his address, I will not present a blow by blow rebuttal or discussion on the many issues he traversed. I will rather, distil from his address several core issues and deal therewith. A more detailed debate on these and many other issues will be presented on the floor of Parliament by our elected representatives. Mine is to set the tone for those debates and not to steal the thunder from them or even ream the magic out of the words they will use.

You will note ladies and gentlemen of the Press that I have repeatedly been making reference to THE PEOPLE. Turning our attention to President Kgama’s address, you note that his theme makes reference to PEOPLE. It enjoins “Delivering People Centred Development”. In his choice of theme the President has set out our parameters of reference. We must make a few quick observations. If his development is to be people centred as he exhorts, we expect to see and feel these people. Who are they ? Where are they found and how does his address speak to their issues ? This is a question we must raise and seek answers to. Our expectation is also that President Kgama must, in his own address, place these PEOPLE to whom he refers, at the epicentre. Other commentators have heaped praises and commendations of President Kgama for his recent crusade to eradicate poverty. I wanted so much to join that chorus of appreciation. And I listened particularly attentively to his address if only to then congratulate him for this as well. I sensed a disjuncture, some measure of break with his predecessors. The phase of BDP leadership presided over by President Masire, had, as its focus, “alleviation of the effects of poverty”. Then came President Mogae who shifted this focus slightly, if he did shift at all, to “poverty reduction”. I must at this point let Professor Kenneth Good take up the argument and make the point for me. He wrote,

“As in the past, the starkness of the dichotomy of wealth and power with poverty and weakness is a structural element in the political economy of relatively wealthy Botswana, manipulated and maintained, often in nuanced terms, sometimes ostensibly, by government policy”.

It is our unequivocal contention that the endemic poverty that our people live in is direct result of successive policies and programmes of the BDP and cannot be undone by the administrative fiats of President Kgama. And yet he comes up now and suggests that he will attain “poverty eradication”. Just as we were about to take him seriously on this crusade and examine his claims, he asserts in the State of the Nation Address that his simply a moral crusade ! He states in his introduction that “...Government has shifted its strategic focus beyond alleviation measures and achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty, to a renewed moral commitment to eradicate absolute poverty...”.

So the President is merely expressing a moral commitment as yet unrealizable. The policies of his own government are internally inconsistent, incoherent and contradictory. If you recall, in the Budget Speech presented by his Minister of Finance in February this year, the Government is recorded as pursuing a policy called National Strategy for Poverty Reduction. Quite clearly, the bulk of President Kgama’s address insofar as it makes any claims to addressing poverty is no more than evidence of confusion and muddled motives !

The President’s address fails to present any credible answer to the recalcitrant reality of landlessness among many Batswana. He fails to acknowledge that his government, taking its cue from his predecessors, has never appreciated land as an economic resource that our people must have and enjoy. There is little wonder then that with the same crusading zeal that His Excellency is busy making moral exhortations about poverty, his Minister of Lands and Housing is busy repossessing land that these same poor people so desperately need resources to develop for residence ! We are left in no doubt, therefore, that His Excellency does have the interests of PEOPLE at heart. The obdurate truth, borne out by his own programmes and actions is that these PEOPLE who matter to him and around whom his development is centred are certainly not the vast majority of Batswana still stalked by abject poverty and landlessness. It therefore does not surprise that His Excellency’s address is unable to favour us with statistics regarding how many people are still awaiting allocation of residential land by Land Boards and other agencies and how long the waiting periods are. He fails to explain to us the reasoning and justification behind Minister Molefhi’s land grabbings when these poor people have been unable to develop by reason that they are poor ! He fails to appreciate that these poor people have not sold or on-sold the land because they desire, to develop the land for themselves and their children. They are unable to develop because of their poverty and deprivation. This government pushes them further and deeper into poverty by its actions programmes and policies.

This is really the recurrent issue in regard to the State of the Nation Address. The President is in serious denial about the causes and manifestations of problems and the approach he takes is therefore one that defies any credible description.

We must also point out that there are still no Youth Empowerment programmes in this country despite much public posturing and rhetoric. Any Youth Empowerment strategy must intimately understand the trends of behaviour among the youth. It must afford the youth opportunities to develop whatever unique talents and preferences for business they may have. It must not seek to turn all young people into cattle barons and goat owners. In a word youth empowerment schemes must truly serve the interests, talents and business preferences of the youth and not seek to make a farmer out of every young person.

Our central message remains that the present government presents no policy or programmatic framework for the alleviation of the effects of poverty ; much less can it eradicate poverty. Any efforts it may pursue are all foredoomed to failure.

The President’s discussion of the crisis in the Ministry of Education and Skills Development is astonishing. He decries that the fact that the teachers have now become more aware of their rights and are firm in asserting them. They have moved away from their previous natural impulse of silence and docile acceptance. The same courts the President exults have adjudged that invigilation is not part of the normal duties of a teacher. The honeymoon is now over. This situation calls for leadership. The President has offered None. He either does not appreciate the scale of risk he has put our people’s children in or their plight simply does not count. In other words the teachers, learners and their parents and relatives are not the PEOPLE around whom his development is centred.

I decide to stop thus far, Ladies and gentlemen of the Press, to take any questions and to provide more detail to our response.

Duma Boko.

President, Botswana National Front.