FACULTADES, FUNCIONAMIENTO Y RESPONSABILIDADES DEL COMITÉ EJECUTIVO NACIONAL

Year Cattle Goats Sheep Donkeys Horses Chicken Pigs

1979 2,840 616 152 127 18 740 6 1980 2,911 638 149 130 22 833 6 1981 2,967 621 140 127 24 1,046 5 1982 2,979 636 140 138 24 1,146 5 1983 2,818 783 165 142 23 961 5 1984 2,685 889 167 139 23 714 7 1985 2,459 1,138 200 146 23 1,020 9 1986 2,332 1,332 229 142 24 1,179 11 1987 2,264 1,470 240 147 24 1,283 11 1988 2,408 1,691 259 150 28 1,810 13 1989 2,549 1,897 286 151 32 2,013 15 1990 2,696 2,092 317 158 34 2,126 16

Statistical data from the Ministry of Agriculture indicate that the rural population increased from 770,000 people in 1981 to 1,009,000 people in 1991 {ibid.). Over the same period the number of households holding cattle declined from 57,700 to 50,300. The number of households with 21 cattle declined from 29,800 in the same period to 23,500. Since the size of the national herd was only about 5% less than in 1981 this decline must be attributed to a sharp increase in the skew of the distribution of ownership and not the 1982-1987 drought spell as some studies claim (Valentine, 1993a).

Our contention is that the decline in the economic status of the bulk of the rural population is not a consequence of drought and other related natural disasters, but reflects a long-term trend which is often only exacerbated by drought. The two phenomena, viz, state interventionism and drought, may occasionally have reinforced each other in fostering social differentiation but the historical reality is that drought is hardly a long-term determinant of social change in Botswana. The next chapter addresses this issue in more detail.

In 1875 Chief Khama III of the Bangwato possessed an estimated 8,000 cattle and had an annual income of some £3,000 (Good, 1993). Even though the rinderpest epidemic of 1895 decimated 95% of the Tswana cattle, Tshekedi Khama who boasted that he "inherited all Khama’s cattle and... the area in which they were run", amassed 50,000 cattle in the mid-1920s (Wylie, 1990). When Tshekedi Khama went into exile at Rametsana in the late 1940s, his followers brought with them between 25,000 and 30,000 cattle. While such accumulation by the tribal leaders occurred, with some rulers receiving £3,500 to £7,000 annual incomes from their participation in the collection of colonial taxation, the lot of the poor have worsened. Isaac Schapera observed in the 1940s that 10 percent of households had no cattle. This figure was up to 29% in the 1970s and had reached 45% by 1980. In 1992 the proportion of agricultural households without cattle was 39% (Good, 1993).

Thus, it is pretty clear that inequalities in Botswana display strong continuities between the pre­ colonial, colonial and the post-independence period. For instance, rural investment remained virtually stagnant between 1966 and 1973. Investment in the rural economy experienced a dramatic decline of 5% of the capital budget during the 1972/1973 financial year (Colclough and Fallon 1983). Government policy after independence was so insensitive to the needs of the rural communities that a "conscious" policy was adopted to ignore rural development altogether and concentrate development efforts on mining and urbanisation (Picard, 1987 and Shrestha, 1986). As Gulhati (1990a and 1990b) rightly concludes this policy worked primarily because "political commitment was weak" in the rural sector of the economy.

4,8

Bates’ argument, in the text mentioned at the beginning of this Chapter, is based on three thematic premises. The first argument is that African governments adopt policies that have harmful consequences for the majority of rural agricultural producers. Second, these policies are determined by political considerations on the part of governments bent on perpetuating their hold on power. Finally, the primary social objectives of such pervasive policies are such that governments are compelled to extract revenue from the rural economy so that they can meet the demands of state-led industrialisation and, among other things, earn foreign exchange. Governments are also concerned with lowering food prices in urban areas so that they can tame the political passions and ambitions of various politically powerful interest groups.

According to Bates, political processes in Africa are primarily manifest in the sphere of the market. The role of the market is crucial at the three levels, viz; the market for the factors of production, the market for rural agricultural produce and the market for urban manufactured consumer goods. Governments manipulate prices at all market levels so that they can promote the extraction and channelling of surplus from the rural to the urban areas. The result is that the peasantry is eventually

... compelled to surrender its resources to the upper classes, to the state, and to the industrial sector (Bates, 1981, p.7)

At the beginning of this Chapter we mentioned certain concerns raised by two Botswana politicians and a Zimbabwean businessman concerning Botswana’s post-independence developmental model. The overriding concern is what they perceive to be a rural-orientated developmental trajectory that promote a “cattlepost mentality" hostile to the urbanisation and, by and large, inimical to the ethics and demands of modern industrial society. This perception contradicts Bates’ depiction of post-colonial African society.

But it must be pointed out that the difference between Botswana and other African countries is one of degree and not kind. In the case of Botswana it was not rural agricultural policies per se that determined the course of rural development and change. The nature of the evolution of the state sector also played a crucial role. However, the centrality of politics to the formation and execution of agricultural policies in Botswana is as evident in our analysis as it is in the Bates thesis. The political and social purposes of such behaviour are not, however, as clearcut as Bates suggests. The quest for rapid state-led industrialisation is not clearly evident in Botswana. What emerges is a single quest for hegemonic control and the theatre of politics is located in the rural sector.

There are also neither concerns with lowering urban food prices nor efforts to appease urbanites confronted with “financial retrenchment” . As the next Chapter illustrates, the Botswana ruling coalition is concerned with depoliticising the rural electorate through the pervasive use of pseudo-welfarist schemes. In fact certain factors, partially, impose some limits to the Bates perspective with respect to the political economy of rural transformation in Botswana. First, the cattle-based nature of the rural economy, coupled with excessive subsidisation and privileged access to the European Union, through the Beef Protocol of the Lome Convention, makes it difficult for the “development coalition", which in any case has strong ties and historical roots in the rural sector, to manipulate markets in such a way that rural communities suffer alone.

However, the market for the factors of production, especially land and capital, are evidently being used for covert political purposes. But although a disproportionate majority of rural dwellers suffer from this, it is not easy to solely apportion the blame to the state and ignore natural visitations like drought. The reductionist underpinnings of the Bates rational choice paradigm are open to criticism. It has, particularly, been argued that the basic problem with Bates’ analysis rests with the assumption that it is possible to "unambiguously separate economically rational and politically rational courses of action” (Berry, 1993b, p.1056). The striking paradox with the Botswana experience is that poverty exists in the rural economy and its magnitude, albeit largely unknown, is thought to be unacceptably high as argued in thesis. But despite the fact that the ruling coalition has manifestly been unwilling or unable to invest appropriately and continually in the rural sector, that is promoting economically productive ventures in the sector, it still draws the majority of its support from the rural dwellers (see the next two Chapters).Thus rural agricultural policies in Botswana are much more fractious and unpredictable and therefore do not easily lend themselves to reductionist analysis.

The latter observation is no way more evident than in the case of Bakgalagadi. The latter are an ethnic group of people who live in or around the Kalahari desert. They are Bantu-Speakers and linguistically distinct from the San. Historically, they were dominated by Tswana tribes but benefited from the imposition of Pax Britannica in 1885. Colonial rule weakened the economic restrictions that had previously been imposed on them by their Tswana counterparts (Solway, 1994a and 1994b). By the 1970s property accumulation among these people was such that they had already adopted views and values associated with modern commerce. Even today, some of them are well known politicians. But still dominant Tswana groups still seek to undermine them by appealing to their history of “servitude” (ibid.). Chapters 5 and 6 indicate how non-economic factors like ethnicity, culture and geographical location can influence the course of rural change among rural communities. They also indicate that such communities can, and often do, extricate themselves from the web of state interventionism.

4.9 Conclusion

Social inequalities and stratification in Botswana are sanctioned by both history and state policy. Individual accumulation has always enjoyed supremacy in the country but it is structurally and ideologically determined by non-economic factors like tribalism, social class and state policy. It is these same factors that continued to influence the path of rural development in the post-colonial period up to the 1990s. The Botswana political elite, united by a common tradition of livestock ownership and ethos, has failed to remove those socio-economic, political and cultural factors that stand in the way of sustained rural development.

But events of the 1980s point to a changed outlook with respect to both the radicalisation of state policies and the weakening of political acquiescence. It is in the light of the latter development that the next two chapters seek to address the question of peasant consciousness and its response to unjust Government policies.