inBUSINESS Issue 12

APRIL/MAY 2017
EDITORIAL
ACTING EDITOR
Douglas B. Tsiako
NEWS EDITOR
Tuduetso Tebape
WRITERS
Malebogo Ratladi
Raymond Moremi
Ononofile Lonkokile
MARKETING & ADVERTISING
Bone Letlole
Loatile Leteane
Mishingo Keorapetse
Disoso J. Pheto
Mbakisano Tjiyapo
DESIGN & LAYOUT
Nkagisang T. Molefhe
PHOTOGRAPHY
Baagedi Setlhora
CONTRIBUTORS
Modiri Mogende
Natasha Selato
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EDITORIAL
Nkaigwa Repudiated Himself
The wild utterances of Haskins Nkaigwa about tribe and territory being primary factors
in leadership must be treated with utter contempt because they are at once a damnable
discredit to the one who prated them, a disgrace to the forum where he prattled and
an ignominy fit for divine condemnation. For how is it possible that anyone can go to
Parliament to advance a cause of regionalism, tribalism and ethnicity?
This man is not to be dismissed as just a dumb ox chewing the cud, for he could mistake
that as encouragement to bring forth more froth. Instead, because our system does not
provide for procedures leading to banishment from Parliament, he is to be censored
without sparing a measure, and this includes rejection at the polls for misrepresenting the
people who voted for him.
Here is more why: We live in a world that is still capable of untold death and destruction
that can follow dangerous utterances. The worst of these must certainly be what followed
the Spanish conquest of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century: when the Europeans
arrived there, there were 50 million people. A few centuries later, the population had been
reduced to a mere two million. The ‘conquistadors’ acted in the wake of speeches that
referred to the native populations as vermin and non-Catholic heathens.
A better known genocide is Adolf Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews mainly in
Germany, most of them in specially-built gas chambers inside concentration camps. “A
state that in this age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements
must some day become the lord of the earth,” the Fuhrer had written in Mein Kampf ahead
of “The Final Solution.”
The least recorded is the African genocide during which countless millions of Africans
were shipped across the Red Sea, the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, the trans-Saharan
caravan route and the Atlantic Ocean during which no one cared to note how many
drowned, were tossed to whales as excess baggage, or otherwise did not make the journey.
For several decades now, Jubilee 2000 has campaigned for the hidden truth of the African
genocide during the slave trade to be unveiled so as to make a case for reparations along
the lines of what accrues to Israel in restitution for atrocities of Nazi Germany in which
other European countries and the US were complicit by their collective failure to protect
Jews. It is a matter for serious lamentation that the Jews have today turned the fury of their
resentment for the West for Hitler’s ‘final solution’ on innocent Palestinians.
Rwanda presents a more recent example of what promotion of ethnicity can do. When
‘Hutu Power’ rose against the Rwandan Patriotic Front that Hutus regarded as an alien
force because it consisted of Rwandan Tutsi refugees living in Uganda, 800 000 Tutsis
perished within 100 days beginning 7April 1994.
Between 1983 and ’87, Robert Mugabe’s Shona-led Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwean
army carried out ethnic cleansing among the Ndebele in which 80 000 people were killed,
all of them civilians. We say nothing of how much Gatha Buthelezi’s Inkatha held back
SA’s liberation struggle because its principals somehow managed to mislead Zulus into
believing that they had a common destiny with white supremacists. Or the untold harm
that apartheid visited upon the entire southern African region over centuries.
Ironically, by his utterances, the MP for Gaborone North has renounced himself and
the programme that he purports to advance because the thrust of his essential illorgic is
that the UDC has no business seeking to win elections for the reason that the ‘tradition’
of this country is to return the BDP at every turn! Among his supporters was a man who
once distinguished himself as a talented troublemaker by mounting a spirited crusade to
prevent the return of Sidney Pilane to the opposition fold by making insidious hints that
Pilane would be returning as a turncoat whose mission was to derail the firming course of
the opposition so that Domkrag may extend its life further.
But the MP for Mogoditshane, Sedirwa Kgoroba, could not deflect the suspicion that
what he and his cabal truly feared was the superior intellect, oratory, financial clout and
penmanship of the man they so ruthlessly maligned. They must also have been troubled
that they could become perishable mortals of vanishing value and diminishing utility in
the presence of the illustrious lawyer.
At any rate, while we hold no brief for Pilane as an upright man, we think it right to
call attention to the consuming fear of many in the ranks of opposition supporters that
the BMD quotient of the UDC is made up of sojourners who are likely to make a hasty
retreat as soon as President Ian Khama is out of the way, which should be fairly imminent.
Therefore, instead of harnessing his energy to forces of destruction, Kgoroba might have
done better to focus on allaying these fears.
www.inbusiness.co.bw | Issue 12 | 2017 5