San displacement and re-settlement in postcolonial Botswana is one of the most controversial policy issues to confront the government in the recent past. The fact of the matter is that government has politically, administratively and institutionally undermined the economics of San public welfare and human rights because of its inability to tame the passions and excesses of outside claimants, especially cattle barons and an emerging bureaucratic bourgeoisie whose interests are coterminous with those of the ruling class coalition. Post-colonial pretensions to a social democratic, or social market, legacy have lost ground to market fundamentalism. The emerging ruling development coalition has amassed wealth beyond the imagination of the ordinary citizen. It is uncompromising in its overlordship and social engineering, wading off, in its triumphalism, any chances of containing and civilising its course. It brooks no social obligation. Its excesses continually undermine the political community, development ethics and universal human values appertaining to individual and social welfare in a social market economy. Asymmetrical power relations and the rigidity of institutional structures of decision-making have not only eroded extant and potential entitlement relations, but also negated San citizenship.
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