Lawrence Ookeditse
19 August 2008
opinion
Conversing with him, one gets a sense of subtlety that is uncharacteristic of a trainee lawyer. He is a student leader turned civic leader, now a qualified and professional lawyer.
One perceives a sense of capitulation that never was present before in the defiant, diminutive politician. Our first encounter was back at the University of Botswana while I was a second year politics student.
With the Mass-BNF facing possible annihilation at the hands of the Botswana Democratic Party surrogate, GS-26, Ramaotwana made a comeback to student politics, taking on the mature, Lazarus Lekgoanyane, in one of the most interesting duels he has ever been engaged in.
A cartoonist drawing on the eve of the election depicted him, in his trademark spectacles, finishing the race triumphant with Lekgoanyane panting behind followed by Dithapelo 'Stix' Keorapetse of the BCP and the maverick, Nkwalili Nkosana, a Themba Joina copycat of sorts who fancied himself as a revolutionary of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) holding rallies with two guards clad in military fatigues by his side. He came a distant last. The cartoonist was spot on. Thus he became the sole representative of the BNF in the student council of 2004-2005, sparking talk that he would be ousted the following day after winning the election. "Ga ba kake ba kgona Nelson", I remember Tina Kaisara, a Mass-BNF well wisher back then defiantly telling how he would neutralise - alone as he was - the entire GS-26 cabinet. He stayed the course and steered the SRC.
"Viva student power viva! Faatshe ka bagateledi, faatshe!" I vividly recall him chanting over a petition submitted to Professor Bojosi Otlhogile, who seemed a little shaky as the mob of students stood by their leader's side. That was in the summer of 2004. He had just made a comeback to the student representative council presidency. His taste for revolutionary politics was hard to miss, waging a campaign yet again in early 2005 to oppose the deportation of reputed University of Botswana scholar, Kenneth Good.
Having lived his teenage and early adult years in politics, and in a constant struggle for and against power which he fully and willingly accepted, it came as a surprise, though not entirely astonishing to many when he announced he was quitting politics for the Attorney General's Chambers for "peace of mind away from political gossip and character assassination".
Not a surprise because we know history harbours many fatigued, battle wary men and women who once savoured the acrid smell of blood and gunpowder and believed they had enough of the madness of battle. Given the chaotic order characterising the BNF at the moment, he too can be said to be a battle wary warrior. But the character that evolved over the years, having learnt many things, would not permit him total capitulation. It came as a surprise since revolutionaries are known for their love for political skirmishes, always coming out of political tussles with a sense of satisfaction that only they can really make sense of. Like Lenin, Stalin, Guevara, Castro and Mao. To them, victory seems to be somewhere in effort but not the actual result of a cause, Otherwise, how does one explain the energy to go on even after rigorous challenges seen by the ordinary citizens to be but a waste of time and effort? In fact, at one point his interference is said to have led to MASS-BNF walking out of an electioneering pact with the BCP' University of Botswana Congress for Democracy, going it alone only to lose all the seats to GS-26 BDP at UB, a thing many students condemned. The year 1970 began with the world's attention firmly on the Nigerian Civil war, with Biafra forces under General Ojukwu capitulating on January 12 and formally surrendering to General Yakubu Gowon to cease the war.
In Rhodesia it was the year the 'Rhodesians' formally severed ties with Britain, declaring themselves a racially segregated state. It is the same year the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty came into effect. In the same year, Edward Heath became British Prime Minister while Richard Nixon lowered the voting age in the United States to 18. The Soyuz 9, a Soviet Union two-man spacecraft is launched while in Argentina on June 8 a military junta takes over.
It was hardly a year of political rest. For rock enthusiasts, that year brought the last studio performance of the British band, The Beatles. The same year, on April 10, Paul McCartney was to announce that The Beatles had disbanded.
Throughout the year, for Lido Ramaotwana the most important thing on her mind must have been not the political turmoil of the Cold War but the child she was carrying. September 7, 1970 in world history marks the day when an anti-war rally was held at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, while fighting broke out between Arab guerillas and government forces in Amman, Jordan.
"I remember on the Sunday I went to the borehole to water the cattle and quickly returned, ground my sorghum and took some rest. The following day, a Monday, I had him. We named him Ramaotwana after his grandfather who was a church bishop," says Mother. He was to christen himself Nelson.
Born Ramaotwana Ramaotwana on 7 September 1970 at Marobela, a tiny dusty dot of a village somewhere in northeast Botswana, the Zion Christian Church member was away from the political scene at birth. Unlike the Ntime, Saleshando, Dingake and Khama families, he was at birth detached from politics.
He acquired his political tastes along the way, opting not for the Botswana People's Party, the Pan-African movement, but instead for the more revolutionary Botswana National Front, the party that had something of a grip on him, surviving two major break ups in 1998 when the Botswana Congress Party was formed and in 2003-04 when the National Democratic Front was born, but showing unwavering commitment to BNF ideals, he stayed on.
A defiant personality and bull like tenacity helped him survive several challenges to the Botswana National Front. Being of a peasant upbringing, he held in disdain and contempt the individualist nature of the capitalist order. Such tenacity is the result of his moulding as a young boy whose family had to relocate from Marobela to Semitwe because their ploughing fields became sandy and lost fertility.
"He was an intelligent boy. When he was young he would go to the goats' barn and identify to us which kid was male. At 12 he would go down to the manual borehole and single-handedly water all the cattle," Lido Ramaotwana recalls. Many villagers told the young boy's father, Uda Ramaotwana, they were surprised at the boy's intelligence. To date, a collection of axes, cups, shovels he won as a student, a straight 'A' student, still litter the Ramaotwana household.
The 'boy' later rose to lead the University of Botswana SRC, leading some of the most crippling class boycotts in the history of the school. He earned himself the reputation of a 'strike-happy' leader, not a bad tag among the students.
"He introduced us to hard hitting politics. He simply took the administration head on. At one point the school had to close and we were made to sign the 'Nkomati accord' which took away many things we had hoped for, Martin Dingake remembers. Nkomati was a non-aggression treaty signed between the apartheid South Africa and Mozambique government in 1984. The papers the students had to sign to re-enter the university were dubbed thus to pacify the administration. The losses arising were never quite blamed on the slick politician.
The 4th of 11 children and the first born of the boys had to learn the ropes quickly and he was up to the challenge. Establishing a 'village record' he began ploughing the family fields as a young boy.
He was never to forget his background as he still has the 'last word' on family matters, according to his mother, Lido. The leadership roles he took up at a young age were to be replicated when he became a student politician, inspiring many others along the way as he created foes.
"He always believed in 'we' instead of 'I", Martin Dingake, a BCP activist who schooled with him at the University of Botswana says.
"I admired his commitment to politics and I told him that when he retired even though I was his political adversary".
Dingake was not so surprised when he quit because from what he read in the papers he was 'frustrated' at the non-redemption of the 'Moupo lobby group', which he left upon realising that it 'had no direction'.
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