Abstract

Tirelo Setshaba (TS), a form of national service, served to expose O-level graduates to the realities of their own society—the conditions and lifeways of people in rural and remote areas—by providing a bridging year for matriculating to tertiary education, with the intention of making their participation in continuing education more effective. As a thirteenth year in a twelve-year educational system, the government of Botswana also designed national service to promote self-development, cross-cultural exposure, and to build work experience for its participants. Of these goals, the key site of interaction was cross-cultural. Inspired by study service in Asia and the youth service scheme in Guyana, TS placed participants with user departments, on individual assignments in primary schools, rural clinics, with the kgotla (local government), and many others. The program expanded rapidly, to a plateau of 850 participants from 1986 to 1990, and again to a plateau of 6,250 participants between 1994 and 1998. Its costs rose from a few thousand US dollars per annum to over 10 million in 1997.

In 1998, the Botswana government decided that TS would have its last intake in April 1999 and terminate it in April 2000. The government perceived national service as a program that "'triple benefited" a small, elite minority of youth, but neglected the majority of youth (83% of the age group). At the same time Namibia and South Africa were planning to introduce a form of national service, too. Our main findings reveal that, while failing to implement the key educational components that had been originally planned in the early 1980s, the majority of the participants (80%) valued their experience highly and thus equated it to a successful thirteenth year. Those opposed to national service felt that it was a waste of time, and that it delayed their tertiary education. As one participant wrote in his work diary, TS was as "a year of forgetting, rather than learning." Originally designed as an elite program, mainly for those who would go on to tertiary education, TS was terminated ostensibly because of its high costs and loss of relevance. The small group of decision makers in Botswana, however, no longer wanted their children to participate in national service.

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