Public Accounts Committee of Parliament

HoHoHo-HaHaHa!!!!LOLLLLLL. And so the “second best-performing Ministry” can’t even explain their accounting book discrepancies to the Public Accounts Committee! Lord have mercy on our land.

DIS boss and "lazy Government Officials"

The article entitled “DIS boss slams Government Officials” in the most recent Weekend Post newspaper makes for very sad reading. It makes me wonder why Mr. Kgosi does not escalate these problems he encounters, of uncooperative Government Officials to his job supervisor – or does he not have one?

It reminds me of the advice of a Chinese Government representative to a Botswana Government official, concerning the lack of competency of a Chinese Government-owned company to carry out a “mega” project in Palapye; which advice was also ignored, and which project has also disastrously failed.

According to the newspaper report, Mr. Kgosi’s Department of Intelligence and Security (DIS) has now adopted a “wait and see approach” as mega projects hurtle towards otherwise avoidable catastrophes. I don’t blame Mr. Kgosi’s DIS for this; anyone in similar circumstances would probably do likewise.

But surely there is someone to blame, and surely President Khama has the power to get rid of that someone. Question is – is he capable of identifying the culprit? If not, will his victory in 2014 elections make any difference?

Voter numbers or Voter names?

If you are wondering why I relentlessly pursue the matter of general elections, the reason is simple – it is the only time that I am given a say in how I want the country run. After the general elections, political parties and “civic” organisations meet at the GICC to do a “post-mortem”. We, ordinary citizens are never invited to these gatherings. Therefore to me the general elections are the beginning and the end of my democratic participation. As such, I need to be convinced that the result of the general elections IS A TRUE REFLECTION OF THE VOICE OF THE MAJORITY.

I fail to understand why, after dissolution of Parliament, Ministers then use taxpayer’s money to run the length and breadth of the country purportedly to tell us the citizens, about Government programmes.   Because Parliament stands dissolved, our input to these Ministerial and Presidential Kgotla gatherings cannot be acted upon; so why do we as taxpayers have to fund these gatherings? Indeed what other rationale is there for these gatherings other than political campaigning by the Ministers and/or President? It boils down to one phenomenon – abuse of office!

There have been two disturbing announcements by the government last (and this) year, in relation to next year’s general elections:

1. That computers would play a greater role than ever before in an election.
2. That election registration numbers would no longer be used but rather, that NAMES would be used instead.

Our population is a little over two million people.  In such a small population is there justification for widespread computer deployment during general elections? I would say yes; provided the computers, using the national registration database, are used solely to prevent an individual from VOTING MORE THAN ONCE.  I therefore accept the first of the above announcements, with the qualification just stated.
Given the first announcement, the second announcement presents a dilemma. A computer only understands numbers. Everything that we see a computer accomplish, be it our names, music or video or sound, is represented as a number in the brain of a computer.  The use of voter identification numbers in general elections therefore follows the natural process by which a computer works. My contention is that these numbers ought to be the same numbers that we are given at birth, and that remain our identification numbers until we die. We should not have to be “registered” again, specifically for elections. But numbered we must be.

Imagine the scenario of using only names and not numbers, as Vice President Kedikilwe announced. The election administrators would have a hard time determining if the voter Modise Molefe is the same as the voter Modisi Molefhi. But the numbers of these two people would be different, and no one would be faster at spotting that difference than a computer!

In conclusion, the use of computers at general elections is therefore essential, but so is the use of numbers in association with our names, a role for which our national ID numbers (Omang numbers) are ideal.

That Mmirwa...

He should have been forced to resign, failing which he should have been sacked the day he
stood up in Parliament and declared that there was NO ONE to blame for the failed Serowe
Stadium project.

For those who may have forgotten by now, the Serowe Stadium cost millions
and millions of the taxpayer’s money to build. At completion of the stadium massive cracks
appeared in the structure, rendering the stadium unsafe to use. It later emerged that the
stadium had been built on a geologically unsuitable location.  When Minister Shaw Kgathi (of
Sports and other things) was asked to say whose fault it was he said it was no one’s fault.
And none of those self serving political prostitutes in Parliament called for Mr. Kgathi to
resign or be sacked!

Today what we read about Minister Kgathi is absolutely astounding. In his display of total
ignorance about the extent to which indigenous languages in Botswana differ from the
so-called national language, i.e. Setswana Mr. Kgathi talks of Sebirwa language as though it
was in the same league as Kalanga, Sheyeyi, Shimbukushu. Mr. Kgathi declares that he is a
Mmirwa and would not like Babirwa children to be taught in Sebirwa at Primary school. He
conveniently forgets to tell the house that when he accompanies his boss in the latter’s
walkabouts in Bobirwa, the language of the villagers as captured on Botswana Television does
not need translating so that Khama understands. Those villagers speak in hardcore Sebirwa,
but because of its similarity to Setswana, anyone who understands Setswana, like President
Khama, will understand what the Mmirwa is saying. Not so with Kalanga, and certainly not so
with various Bakhwa (I hate to call them Basarwa) dialects.

Sebirwa, Setswapong, and a few other languages, while different from Setswana, are
nevertheless similar enough to render Setswana understandable to a first-day-at-school child
who has never met a Setswana speaking person before. Not so with Kalanga. I know what I am
talking about because I was such a child, and I used to go through a whole lesson without
understanding a thing. At play time I would then approach my Kalanga friends who had been
brought up in the town, and therefore understood Setswana, to find out what the lesson was
about. It makes me mad to read that ignorant people who sailed through language chauvinism
to positions of privilege at our expense now have the audacity to stand in Parliament and
blow hot air!    

When death penalty is justified...

A month or so ago I read an article by attorney Kgosi* Ngakaagae in one of the local newspapers. Ngakaagae put up a spirited condemnation of the death penalty; not so much a condemnation of the fact that it is practised in Botswana, as of the methods by which the death penalty is retained on our statute books.  Ngakaagae argued that if the people who get consulted in open forums like the Kgotla were told the truth about how inefficient some of the pro-deo lawyers who defend people facing capital punishment were, the Kgotlas might demand that death penalty be abolished. In addition to the inefficiency of the pro-deo lawyers, Ngakaagae criticised the cruelty and inhumanity with which the sentence is implemented.

Ngakaagae’s article has been troubling my conscience a great deal. Surely it is wrong for the state to kill an innocent person. No matter how you look at it, a human life taken in a situation other than during war, can never and should never be treated as collateral damage. Surely the death penalty is not much of a deterrent against would-be murderers, because many now resort to taking their own lives after committing the murders!

I had become a convert to Ngakaagae’s view of the death penalty; until yesterday when I read this week’s “Botswana Gazette” newspaper in which a man is reported to have killed his brother and the brother’s whole family of five members, including a four month old baby. The killer is appealing against six death sentences and is defended by none other than attorney Kgosietsile Ngakaagae himself. When I read about how the killer killed the four-month old baby with a knobkerrie, after killing its mother and grandmother, my mind did a violent rejection of everything that Ngakaagae’s earlier article had done to it. 

I suddenly realised the full justification of the death penalty. I understood that the death penalty is not always about punishing a criminal, but often about RIDDING SOCIETY OF A THREAT TO ITS EXISTENCE. Some will argue, as no doubt attorney Ngakaagae did, that the murderer Orelesitse Thokamolelo had smoked marijuana when he committed the crimes, and was therefore not wholly responsible for the gruesome acts, but I would beg to differ. There will always be marijuana illegally accessible to those who really want it. Society can and should accommodate those who illegally access marijuana, but commit no heinous crimes after smoking it. Society should get rid of (i.e. kill) those who, after smoking marijuana commit crimes of the nature of Orelesitse Thokamolelo’s crimes. The aim is neither to punish them, nor to “make an example of them”, as a warning to the living. The aim is to PROTECT society, period.

Why voter registration..?

My National  Identity card (Omang card) has my unique ID number, which identifies me in the National database of Botswana. Furthermore, my birth date is recorded on the card. The law requires me to carry my Omang card at all times. We are told that in a democracy like ours, every person above the age of 18 years is entitled to vote.  Therefore the moment a day of elections is chosen; all valid-to-vote Omang cards can be calculated and announced to election monitors and the public at large.

Having established “which” Omang cards will be valid on Election Day, the only thing remaining to make the Omang card the Election card, is the place where the bearer MAY vote. But does that really matter if the computers (and election administrators of all parties) RECORD the ID of everyone who goes into the voting booth? No one can vote twice, by changing voting places, because even if they tried, their name and number will show more than once in the voting list and their vote will therefore be rejected by both the computer and the election administrators. In other words, bussing of voters will be futile; because those bussed will be merely reducing their numbers wherever they came from, and there at putting themselves at a disadvantage.

Thus using the Omang card as the sole voting document will result in a next-five-years snapshot of who voted where, such that participants in any in-term by-elections will be easily identified, should their MP or councillor die during term. The Omang database is readily available in Government computers. The whole expensive exercise of “registering” voters is therefore an unnecessary and time-wasting duplication of effort.

Some may argue that a person from Shakawe in the north-west corner of the country, should not be allowed to vote in Mochudi , in the south-east extremity of the country, and determine who will be MP or councillor in the latter area; something that my scheme of things described above would permit! Such an argument does not hold water, considering that a person from Shakawe may relocate to live in Mochudi any day and any time, without need for anyone’s permission or knowledge, for that matter. As things stand today, even with the requirement for “voter registration” in place, a person from Shakawe can relocate to Mochudi just a day prior to registration, and still register and vote in Mochudi , anyway.

So, why register voters at all? I ask you.      

On social breakdowns...

Early this year I read from one of the newspapers that the Chief Justice, Maruping Dibotelo had said that eleven million Pula (P11m) of child maintenance money lay uncollected from the courts by the babies’ mothers. That’s about one and a half million US dollars (US $1.5 m). The money had been paid to the courts by the babies’ fathers. At around the same time it was reported that unwed fathers complain that their babies’ mothers deny them access to their own babies. Last week I read about a priest who allegedly battered his wife to death with a hammer, then surrendered himself to the Police. Yesterday I read Iqbal Erahim’s religious piece in the WeekendPost, complaining bitterly about divorces and the resultant social breakdown.

All these speak volumes about the breakdown of society in general. But let me try and open up my confused mind on some of these “problems”. The first question I ask myself is: Where do the courts keep the P11 million? If it is in banks, why can’t the unwed mothers collect the monies direct from the banks, rather than from the courts? This will in no way increase the administrative burden on the courts, because the fathers will deposit the monies into the mothers’ bank accounts, and then submit the evidence of such deposits to the courts for filling. The mothers will only interact with the courts if their accounts have not been credited for a specific month. It seems to me that this will actually lessen the administrative load on the courts.

Should unwed fathers be allowed access to their babies? Here we need to go back to the IKalanga basics. In Kalanga it is the exception, rather than the rule, that two young unwed people engage in sex. When it happens though, a child is usually born. This child, like all other children born in wedlock, is entitled to a home and a family. If its biological parents cannot, for whatever reason, marry each other, then the child will either belong to the mother’s family, or be “wed” by the father, and belong to the father’s family. Yes, in Kalanga tradition a child is wed by its father in exactly the same way that its mother would be, except that there is no sex between father and child. The mother’s family “gives the child away” to the father, and the father pays a dowry (malobolo). This does not imply barring the mother from further access to the child. It simply means that if the mother should get married to another man, “adoption” of the child by the other man will be proscribed. Indeed the biological father, to whom the child will have been “married”, will have the option to take his child to his family, on the child’s mother getting married to another man.

The baby’s mother’s family cannot refuse to “give a child away in marriage” to its biological father, if the father has paid “damages” for impregnating their daughter, and if the father is mentally stable and economically capable of rendering a good upbringing to his child. The issue of mothers “barring” fathers from access to their children therefore falls away as such fathers would simply take away their “wed” children to their own (fathers’) families. The right of a father to “marry” his child is not absolute, though. If society should determine that the child’s father does not want to marry the child’s mother for no other reason than that he has someone else in mind to marry, then society (the courts) can refuse to let the father “marry” his child.

 In view of the above I do not believe that unwed fathers who have not “married” their children should have a right of access to their children, whether or not they pay child maintenance for such children.

What about “same-sex” marriages? For a start I DO believe that what goes on in anyone’s bedroom between two people is nobody else’s business but their own.  Equally, I DO believe that those two people should NOT make their relationship my business, either by demanding that I declare them to be married or that I recognize them to be so married. I believe that where there is no possibility of a child being born, marriage makes no sense at all. Where there is a possibility, but fertility issues intervene, marriage can and should be conducted. Child adoption should then complete the process.

People who decide to live with sexual partners of the same sex as themselves should be eligible to individually “marry” children from the state, the same way that Kalanga fathers “marry” their own biological children from the would-be in-laws  But since these would not be their own children, such people should be put under stricter scrutiny by the state or by whosoever gives them their child to adopt. The state should then proffer a tax rebate/exemption to such a parent on the basis of her/his having “married” a child, and not on the basis of her/his having  “married” a same-sex partner.