Africa-Press – Botswana. Minister for International Affairs, Dr Phenyo Butale has commended regional founding fathers for forging historic relations.
Speaking in an interview on the sidelines of the burial of Namibia’s founding president, Dr Sam Nujoma on March 1, Dr Butale acknowledged yesteryears regional leaders for laying a solid foundation toward regional and continental prosperity.
“Credit to Sam Nujoma and leaders of his time for playing a pivotal role in leading liberation struggles and freeing their countries as well as forging lasting ties,” Dr Butale said.
These liberation heroes, he said laid a foundation of selflessness that placed the interests of their nations first hence the solid structure and framework, and the cooperation that SADC region and other multilateral forums prided itself with.
He said such multilateral forums were important in solidifying cohesiveness in the world.
“It is through such efforts by the founding fathers that nations have recognised the need to cooperate through the establishment of multilateral organisations,” he said.
Dr Butale said there was a lot that the current crop of leaders could learn from founding fathers as they had left a legacy of servant leadership.
“Yesteryears leaders like Dr Nojuma, Sir Seretse Khama and other members of the frontline states were dedicated to putting the interests of their nation at heart all the time and everything about them was for the people,” he said.
He commended the visionary collaboration between the liberation struggle leaders and the frontline states citing that it should be an inspiration to today’s’ leadership as it emphasised the need for regional unity toward overcoming unforeseen future challenges.
“Founding fathers had long foreseen the need for a united Africa to achieve modern instruments such as the Africa Free Continental Trade Area agreement, which is aimed to promote intra Africa trade and support Africa’s economic growth,” he said.
He thus said today’s leaders should understand that being in a position of power should translate into being a servant of the people at all time.
He said founding fathers had visionary leadership quality attributes, which played an important role in transforming their nation’s livelihoods.
Additionally, Dr Butale applauded African leaders for unifying the continent through been actively involved in coordinated peace keeping efforts across the continent.
“One would recall that Botswana and other regional countries are always responsive when called to do their bit, we always come through when the need arise and testament to that is our recent troop deployment in Mozambique and we were also among the first to finically contribute towards the Democratic of Congo mission,” he said.
He nonetheless said a lot was still to be done in being more proactive in nurturing peaceful means of conflict resolution.
With the adaptation of human right centric government approach to its foreign policy, Dr Butale thus said Botswana remained a beacon of peace and democracy.
“We want to entrench among our African counterparts that peace and dialogue is the way to go and we must inculcate in our African people that the will of the people must always be respected and the recent peaceful and democratic transition of state power in Botswana is a demonstration of democracy in motion,” he said.
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