02 Oct 2019

Batswana have been urged to look back at the long rugged path their forefathers trudged to bring the nation to what it has become and be grateful for what the Lord has done.

Bishop Themba  Pema of Minister’s Fraternal said in an interview with BOPA during Independence Day commemorations in Kanye that 53 years on, there was still reason for the nation to celebrate.

He recalled that God had done a great deal for the country which was regarded as nothing but a barren desert when it gained independence from Britain in 1966. Batswana, he said,  should appreciate the fact that their forefathers founded  the nation on nothingness and worked their hands raw and through divine wisdom, to bring it to where it was today.

Bishop Pema said the elders laid a solid foundation for the nation through such values as unity, peace, development and freedom of worship. 

He described the values as critical enablers that propelled the nation on the road to development.

Without peace, unity and political stability, he said, there was very little, if anything, the nation could have achieved. 

He urged Batswana to jealously safeguard the founding values at all costs.

Another speaker, Kgosi Kitso Kelosiwang, also stressed the need for Batswana to look back and appreciate God’s strong hand that had brought the nation thus far. What set the nation apart from many across the African continent, he said, was the fact that others inherited fairly developed  countries from colonial masters while Batswana worked their fingers to the bone to develop their country.

Writing at the time, British journalist Charles King of Southern News Services described the country as an empty impoverished, arid and hungry land without hope of achieving economic stability.

He noted that the new blue, white and black flag was flying everywhere in Gaborone, the incongruous capital city, but elsewhere in the vast, trackless waste land that would take the name Botswana, there was little to celebrate.

Mr King further said two years of disastrous drought and crop failure had brought havoc and hunger to widely scattered agricultural inhabitants.

 He said more than a fifth of the population was literally kept alive by emergency feeding and the numbers were rapidly increasing.

The nation had a single railway line, owned and operated by neighboring Rhodesia and a national airline with one plane, a rickety, well-worn DC-3, 2000 cars and trucks, 1,600 telephones and a national radio service which operated two hours a day. 

“It also has debts and economic misery and destined to become an international charity case,” reads the article .ends