Winning the hearts and minds

By Mesh Moeti

Among the local communities within the Okavango Delta Ramsar Site, the most known foot soldier of the Okavango Delta Management Plan (ODMP) project is an affable young man with time for everyone. They all call him Ramji.

Ramogaupi Gaborekwe joined the project as a rural sociologist in February 2005 – midway through the programme.

“It was tough,” he recalls his first days, “I had to learn the ropes when everyone else was sailing smoothly, having learnt the ropes earlier.”

His brief was fairly straightforward – but tough: bring the common man onboard, so that the communities buy into the plan. The project’s current coordinator, Sekgoma Motsumi, names three distinct factors that made this a very challenging assignment for the project team: high illiteracy within the district, the rural nature of the area, and the communities’ perception that this was just one of those projects that pretended to solicit their views while conclusions had already been drawn.

“Stakeholders were consulted in previous initiatives, but there was hardly anything on the ground as a result. We had to prove that ODMP would be different. We had to build trust-and it’s a long-term thing. To be different from other projects, we wanted people to see results on the ground. We wanted to create contact between us and the stakeholders,” says Motsumi.

Then enters Gaborekwe. A graduate of Environmental Science and Sociology, his first job was a gender officer at Women’s Affairs Department, which he followed up with four years as a secondary school teacher. The experiences would come handy in the present job, which threw him into the melting pot of a conservative patriarchal society that has some of the highest illiteracy rates in the country.

“Having been a teacher, I know how to drive home a point. I used teaching skills to simplify environmental issues. In a typical class, you teach learners with different capabilities. You have the cream of the class, the high fliers, and those that can’t even write their names, but at the end of the year each must write an exam. In a way, the kgotla is similar to a class. You have a gathering of learned people, semi-literate, and the illiterate,” Gaborekwe says. “To win the common man, you have to be strategic. You should come down to their level to build trust, maintain it, and be honest with them. You become their child, and when I saw them treating me like that I knew I was going to succeed”.

He explains that contrary to common belief, the rural society is not homogenous. There are various ramifications-there are the rich, the influential, and agitators – and one has to be aware of these dynamics.

He emphasizes the need to respect the local people’s beliefs and customs. To illustrate this point, he tells the story of one meeting he had long scheduled in Tsodilo. Just before the event, one of the chief’s wives died, and her funeral coincided with the meeting.

“When I went into the village the following day, there was not a single soul in sight. They had gone to perform cleansing rituals for the chief, and when that happens everyone goes there because the chief’s wife is the community’s mother. In the evening, when they came back I told them that I respect their rituals and we re-scheduled the meeting. It was a success,” he states.

As Motsumi explains, one of the key features of ODMP is constant communication with communities. The traditional forum for consultation in Botswana’s rural areas remains the kgotla, but these days it is poorly attended. To go about that, each village has an elected contact person who liaises with the programme regularly.

“We hold workshops with them, and they disseminate information to the communities,” Motsumi explains.

The contact persons are some of Gaborekwe’s key allies in the blitz for the communities’ hearts and minds.