Voting in Botswana is so anti-climactic. You are met with chaos once you approach the whole voting area. No branding was visible outside my voting station. It was only the large presence of haphazardly parked cars, one with its slights still on, that hinted that voting could be taking place at the school where my polling station was located.
Once in the school grounds, did you see the two posters with an arrow whispering, “Polling station…” The presence of a line informed me where the actual door way was. After waiting for three hours in a line, where I was probably the 50th person, I finally was able to see pieces of paper printed out from a colour copier, with party logos presented in a square and names hand written on the papers… as to what I was looking at it could be anyone’s guess. The hint came when I saw a former parliamentarian’s name on one of the printouts. Ah-ha! So one column of papers was the MP selection and the other then, must be the councillor’s selection, it had to be since we do not elect the country’s president by direct vote, and really names like Abbot or Nunu are not really presidential… not for me anyway.
Another hour finally saw me participate in my constitutional right, felt like a constitutional inconvenience really. There are reasons why it took 50 people four hours to cast their vote, god knows how long it took all those that came after me. Voting should be simpler and quicker, however the rot was not just at the polling stations it started way before the voting public even lined up before 5AM to cast their vote.
Botswana made a huge investment in population records management infrastructure a long time ago (in Botswana years, we are a “young” country after all) The major short coming about that idea was that it was short sighted. The national identity card (the Omang – the name means “Who are you?”) is stored on an electronic data base, which should mean anyone’s details can be referenced from anywhere in the country from any laptop with internet access. Meaning when you approach your polling station you should be able to just walk up; then the voting officials input your name into the computer; which would then cross reference with the voter’s roll instantly and then you would be ready to vote for who you want to vote for; wherever in the country you may be… sounds like the future doesn’t it, well it isn’t, it is a past in global terms, a past that has yet to be lived by Botswana.
Guess what the present is like at the polling station. You are met by three to five sets of people that you would directly interact with. The first person is there to take your voter registration card and Omang card, yell the numbers therein across the room to someone with a huge print out in front of them (not even a laptop with a searchable database even if it isn’t connected to the internet…) The second person rifles through this print out to look for your name and other details then yells back the corresponding name. The first person then yells the Omang number for the second person to check if it is correct. You then sit down with a third person for them to tell you what you are supposed to do (ie, take the piece of paper that they hand you to a dingy little construct and use an over sized marker to place an X next to the party symbol of your choice – literally that basic) What you have to keep in mind is that the first paper is for your parliamentarian candidate. You then throw that into one ballot box. You go to a fourth person to get another identical piece of paper, this time to select your councillor, you hide behind another skinny triangular construct from before most of us were born, place the x next to the party symbol you prefer and back to you go to a second ballot box.
It would be nice to blame the government… but that’s too easy. How about the building blocks of the government, the civil servants? It would be grossly unfair to just say the government, when the entity is comprised of thousands of minds, some sharper then others while others are utterly dull and blunt, in all senses of the adjectives. However after taking time out to attend workshops by relevant authorities, it turns out that there is a very well developed sense of trying to keep jobs, heightened by the recent global economic woes in more recent times. Technology simplifies many things and can make other job descriptions redundant. Perfect, this will mean that people that are contributing will stay in jobs to produce, and it will mean it will be incumbent on the dullards to sharpen their skills if they want to remain in useful positions.
Back to the sad line of affairs at the polls… by 9:30 AM it wasn’t a great place to be, I know because on my way out of the polling station I was roasting in the morning sun, glad to have been one of the first fifty to show up and get the ordeal over and done with. Imagine that, happy to have voted and been done with it not because I renewed my guy’s mandate in active politics, but because I wouldn’t have to experience the ineffective mess that we are thankfully only subjected to once every five years.
But lets so blame government, it is always easier. To quote Professor Marcia Lausen, the director of Chicago’s UIC School of Art and Design… She has published a book called Design for Democracy, and has been a consultant for reforming the USA’s electoral system. Lausen says, “If a government can not produce materials with clarity and professionalism then they simply can not be trusted.” Put that in your thinking cap and ruminate. And it makes it scary to think why is the electoral system so tedious, even if you had the time to ask an election official what was the reasoning behind the current practices… you would most probably end up at this phrase, “ke tsamaiso ya teng…” a cop out that translates to, that’s just the way it is.
Clicking along avoiding anything remotely work related, I was made aware of Marie Sjoberg's website... All I could think of was quiet little Marie. One of the sweetest dark haired little girls ever. Introspective little thing. Rather shy (then) and frankly a bit of a dreamer... really just like many other 14 year old girls. The very first and ultimately last poem I ever wrote in Swedish ended up in her hands. I never did find out what she did with it. Anyway I graduated from the school we both attended in the same year as her older sister who was a friend of mine. I moved up and down Europe and moved back to Botswana and South Africa and never though about many things, places and people again, Marie included.
