‘This country is not your farm’

UDC parliamentary candidate for Francistown South Wynter Mmolotsi has slammed President Ian Khama for treating Batswana as if they were “mere farm hands to be played with like toys.”

“One can tell that Ian Khama thinks that this country is his family’s farm,” he lashed out at Saturday’s rally to launch Duma Boko as Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) parliamentary candidate for Bonnington North. “As Batswana, we also have ownership rights to this country. As Batswana we have a right – whether we agree with the president or not, whether we agree with the BDP or not – to ownership of this country.

Our friends – just like Khama’s that he takes to Mosu, Shakawe and wherever else – should be able to visit us,” he said. Mmolotsi's anger was prompted by recent developments in which American citizens Rick Yune and Jennifer Bell (both friends of Duma Boko) were added to the list of foreigners who need a visa to enter Botswana. Yune and Boko are good friends from Harvard University where they both studied in the early 1990s. Mmolotsi accused the Botswana Democratic Party government of brazenly applying a double standard because its own fraternal friends don’t have to jump through hoops to enter the country.

He gave as examples South Africa’s businessman Patrice Motsepe and South Sudan’s president Silva Kiir. He said that Kiir led a delegation of his party that met the BDP to strategise on how the two parties could fight off challenge from opposition parties. “Many more foreigners visit to meet with the BDP and as we know, some of them donate money to it,” said Mmolotsi, lamenting that a personal friend of Boko had been denied entry into the country “when it is common knowledge that Americans don’t need a visa to visit Botswana.” Yune suffered fate similar to that of South African opposition politician, Julius Malema and Gordon Bennett, a British lawyer for a Basarwa community in Gantsi that is resisting government plans to relocate them out of their ancestral land.

Mmolotsi said the visa requirement is a ploy to keep friends of opposition members out of the country and is tantamount to declaring them prohibited immigrants. Even as he feared the rally would’ve been swarming with intelligence operatives, Mmolotsi still had a special message he wanted them to relay to Khama. “Tell him Wynter Mmolotsi says that ‘your friends are not special. They are just like ours who should also be allowed to enter our country at anytime they want’,” he said.