setuptools issue

[Rich Shepard]

I want to use tkcalendar and dateentry in my application but have problems
with tkcalendar's dependency on babel and setuptools.

When I try to build babel it fails:
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/tmp/SBo/babel-2.8.1/setup.py", line 7, in <module>
     from setuptools import setup
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'setuptools'

Installed on this Slackware-14.2/x86_64 workstation with python-3.9.1 are:
python-setuptools-22.0.5-x86_64-1
setuptools-git-1.1-x86_64-1_SBo
setuptools-scm-3.3.3-x86_64-1_SBo

Please advise me how I diagnose the reason babel's setup.py cannot find a
suitable setuptools.

TIA,

Rich