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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the comments of Judith Butterman, Ornulf Gulbrandsen, Ellen Hillbom, Robert Hitchcock, Christian John Makgala, and Ian Taylor. Remaining errors are entirely my own.
Notes on contributor
Kenneth Good is an adjunct professor in global studies at RMIT University in Melbourne. He has long-term interests in the limitations on democracy and development in southern Africa, and more recent interests in radical democratisation in Tunisia and Egypt. He can be contacted at: [email protected]
Notes
1. The lecture paper was co-authored with Ian Taylor of St Andrews University, and soon appeared as a chapter in Southall and Melber (Citation2006).
2. Earlier harassment included the theft of two laptops, one from my home, and the other from my UB office. Both actions were skilfully done, and no other property was taken.
3. Bayford thought in early March that we had already won in the court of public opinion, and as I moved around Gaborone, I received greetings of support from many people (Good Citation2008, 154–156).
4. The International Committee for the Legal Defence of Human Rights.
5. The revelations focussed on a number of presidential commissions of inquiry and reports, chiefly the Kgabo report on illegal land-sales, the Botswana Housing Corporation debacle, the near ruination of the NDB, and a chaotic consultancy for the supply of school books by International Project Managers. As the scandals widened, peoples’ interest intensified, and the government was obliged by the weight of public opinion to publish this material (Good Citation1994, 500–513). Access to affordable housing and good schooling were key issues for thousands of urban people.
6. In 1990 one Botswana Pula was worth US$ 0.53; in 1992 $0.44; and in 1994 $0.36.
7. One of the very few foreign scholars to address these sensational events was Ornulf Gulbrandsen (Citation2012, 302–307) who wrote: ‘Never before had rank and file people engaged so extensively, seriously and violently in a confrontation with the state’.
8. When a raft of associated reforms, among them lowering the voting age to 18, limiting presidential rule to two terms, was put to a referendum in 1997, prominent anti-reformist ministers, distrustful of the youth and fearful of change, campaigned for a ‘No’ vote, and turnout was a pitiful 16.7% (Good Citation2002, 19).
9. He also received generous pension and retirement benefits from the state, detailed in Good and Taylor (Citation2006, 570).
10. The Botswana Federation of Public Sector Unions.
11. For instance, DIS had been expected to get the bulk of the P 3 billion allocated to the Office of the President in 2008 (Good Citation2010a, 1). A comparative study in 2009 suggested that it was one of the best resourced intelligence agencies in sub-Saharan Africa (Good Citation2010d, 350).
12. The UDC resulted from agreement between the BMD, BNF and the smaller Botswana Peoples Party aimed at ending self-defeating electoral disunity among the opposition.
13. The deep subordination of the San was examined in Good (Citation1999) and Good et al. (Citation2001).
14. As the country’s biggest employer, and the sponsor of the business activities of many companies, for instance.
15. They did not expand on this often elusive ‘trickle-down effect’ nor on the changed political consciousness of the wealthier segments. Mogae was the most modernist of Botswana’s presidents (and not a cattleman), but at the start of his presidency, he had specifically ruled out as irrational the possibility of improving the condition of the poor by reducing the incomes of the wealthy.
16. Botsalo Ntuane had developed a close friendship with Motswaledi when they were students at UB in the early 1990s, and he said in October 2009 that the latter had ‘always distinguished himself as cut out for leadership … he exude[d] some inexplicable magnetism that draws the masses to him’. When he was suspended by Khama then, ‘the nation [became] aware that it has a future leader’ (cited in Good Citation2010d, 355).