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Botswana

My Lords, when I went up to Balliol 61 years ago, my greatest friend there was Seretse Khama, as my noble friend Lord Jones has reminded me. He used to say that when he became chief he would invite me to stay with him. Some 20 years later, when the CPA proposed to send only two Members—one Labour, one Tory—to the independence celebrations, Seretse personally intervened and insisted that an invitation be extended to me as well. He was a great democratic leader of his people, following the ancestral tradition of the kgotla, a public consultation place and process, in which everyone could participate, predating our own ideas of community politics by centuries. Because of his legacy, Botswana is cited as a model for the rest of Africa. We have heard that from several noble Lords today. But things are not perfect. One local NGO has said that the government have become insensitive to public opinion and that Parliament is now known for serving the interests of the ruling party and not of the people. The general state of democracy has deteriorated over the past decade, they say, with regard to the rule of law, corruption and general aggression on citizens. So perhaps I may, as a friend of Botswana, offer a few words of advice. First, following the noble Lord, Lord St John, I shall deal with the subject of corruption. The recent Botswana Technology Centre scandal and the allegations about the Department of Road Transport and Safety point to the need for the powers and resources of the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime to be strengthened, and for declarations of interest to be required from elected members and officials at every level of government. Freedom of information should be enshrined in law, and Botswana should have a timetabled strategy for ratifying the African convention against corruption, joining 11 other African states. Secondly, as the noble Lord, Lord St John, also mentioned, there is the issue of relations with Zimbabwe. Some 800,000 people fled Zimbabwe for Botswana between 1999 and 2004, but as he said, the Botswana authorities have refouled thousands of them back over the border to the tender mercies of Mugabe, contrary to international law. The Minister said in South Africa last week that a collapse in Zimbabwe would have strong negative neighbourhood effects, with instability spreading across borders, and yet Botswana, like South Africa, treats Zimbabweans as illegal economic migrants and turns a blind eye to the crisis. Thirdly, the government must uphold freedom of expression. Last July, Australian Professor Kenneth Good was kicked out of the University of Botswana and expelled for criticising government policies. The Zimbabwean journalist Roderick Mukumbira was given seven days’ notice to leave the country for unspecified security reasons. The Committee to Protect Journalists said that his expulsion was linked to his reporting on sensitive subjects such as the eviction of the San people from their ancestral lands in the game reserve. The government have banned educational materials about indigenous people that were distributed to 40 other countries. That brings me to the point made by several other noble Lords: the treatment of the San people. Compulsory assimilation is not the answer. All over the world, the result of such policies has been deterioration in the quality of indigenous people’s lives, through disease, alcoholism and loss of social cohesion. Clearly, the individual members of these peoples have the same rights as anyone else to the services provided by the state, as my noble friend Lady Tonge has said. If they decide that they want to continue the sustainable way of life that they have followed since time immemorial, however, they should have that right, too. The UN has been discussing the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for the past 11 years, and a text is at last being submitted for approval to the UN Commission on Human Rights. That would provide an interim yardstick by which the policies of states might be assessed. Article 7 says that indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture. It goes on expressly to prohibit the deprivation of their integrity as distinct peoples, their cultural values or ethnic identities, dispossession of their lands and resources, forced population transfer, forced assimilation or integration and propaganda promoting or inciting racial discrimination. While I join my noble friend Lady Tonge in sending congratulations to Botswana on the approaching 40th anniversary of its independence, on its impressive economic gains, adherence to the letter of democracy and achievements in education and health, particularly in dealing with the scourge of AIDS, I urge the government of Botswana to root out corruption and to address the problems of the weak and vulnerable, whether they be the San, asylum seekers or dissenters from the conventional wisdom.