MOLAPISI'S PARTING SHOT

- BPP President wants political education to be prioritised

President of the Botswana Peoples’ Party (BPP) Motlatsi Molapisi would like to see a BPP cadre that lives by the party’s founding principles of socialism and Pan-Africanism when he leaves office during the national elective congress later this year.

Molapisi is leaving active politics this year and he used a recent interaction with his party members in Tati to impart knowledge about what the BPP is about, imploring those who remain to never derail from the core principles and policies of their movement.

His view is that the current economic challenges are occasioned by the economic policies of the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), adding that these policies are premised on greed, corruption, and submission to neo-colonial and imperialist forces.

The BPP leader decried the glaring indifference towards national politics as displayed by the current crop of political activists, saying it was such disinterest that has bred the maladies of poor attendance and late coming to party meetings. Such apathy, he added, speaks to the lack of urgency of the party leaders and members in general to achieve “regime change’’ because they do not know what they may be missing under a new government.

According to Molapisi, some in the party rank and file do not even know why they are members of the party or even what the party represents and how it differs from the ruling BDP and the other political formations.

“The BPP is a liberation movement keen to have our people mentally liberated. The pan-African philosophy which it espouses is about racial equality while socialism speaks to economic justice. He urged Mbaakanyi Smart and

Ignatius Moswaane - the national organising secretary and secretary for political education respectively - to immediately engage in the mass mobilisation of members, as well as the serious indoctrination of party members in the party’s founding principles and philosophies of socialism and pan-Africanism.

The BPP leader appealed to his party members and the rest of the population to ponder on the question of what they are getting from their country in terms of opportunities when compared to foreigners.

“As BPP, we still believe in African unity and the philosophy of Africa for Africans where the resources on the continent are enjoyed by the locals as opposed to a situation where foreigners own our mines, banks, and big chunks of land and all the major enterprises while we remain beggars in the form of employees.

“Instead, it should be the foreigners including whites, who should come here as employees of big enterprises owned by us,’’ Molapisi rallied.

He added that because of their advocacy for racial equality, African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana were killed by western agents in the form of western-oriented governments or hired individuals.

“If we want to liberate our people and ignite a sense of urgency in them, the urgency for change, we must take political education seriously hence instill political consciousness in the rank and file.

“We must liberate the minds of our people. This will also make them understand the need to, as much as possible, buy from businesses owned by locals as opposed to foreign-owned ones as is the case now,” Molapisi lamented.

He is neither happy with the fact that people here tend to be ashamed of their culture.

“Pan-Africanism wants you to be completely free. You should, as Africans, be proud of your languages and cultures. It is a shame that we are daily abandoning our cultures in favour of western cultures,” said Molapisi, whose desire is to see Western Sahara independent from Morocco.

Molapisi called upon the people to never see poverty as a curse from God.

“Poverty is the result of the BDP economic policies which want a select few in the country to be rich, while the majority are poor,” the BPP leader said.