A few years ago I had an encounter with a senior American diplomat who was at the time based at the United States embassy in Gaborone.
When we met, he was foaming at the mouth.
He could not believe that a president of Botswana had just skipped an opportunity to meet the President of the United States at the White House and instead opted, as he put it to attend a friend’s birthday party in the Okavango.
President Ian Khama was among a shortlist of African presidents that had been carefully selected to travel to Washington to meet Barack Obama at the White House.
The United States embassy in Gaborone had moved mountains to get Khama to attend the meeting in Washington.
It meant a lot to them. And in a typical diplomatic speak, “deliverables” had been identified and lined up.
In the end the embassy was not successful.
And naturally the embassy was horrified to see Khama stand up the most powerful man on earth.
To make matters worse, the Khama slight was all the more painful because the United States ambassador to Botswana at the time, Michelle Gavin, was a personal friend of Barack Obama.
I state the above anecdote in detail, to provide a context of the origins of foreign policy difficulties that Botswana finds itself grappling with today and going forward.
In some capitals across the region but also in the West, Botswana is increasingly regarded with suspicion and wariness.
Obviously, China’s growing influence in Botswana has not gone unnoticed in the West.
For Botswana’s foreign policy, President’s Khama’s tenure in office was in a big way an era-defining moment. That era effectively rolled back many years of outward looking disposition that Botswana had adopted over the years.
He withdrew Botswana’s focus from multi-lateral organization and went unilateralist.
SADC was for him a nuisance and a talk shop. Thus he limited his contact with it.
He also had a deep disdain for the African Union.
And found no point attending the United Nations meetings.
With shocking gusto, he personally took the gunboat diplomacy to altogether new levels.
Barely a month after taking power in 2008, he went after Robert Mugabe in an aggressively public way that shocked many people that were trying to bring sanity in Zimbabwe.
Khama went on to invite to Gaborone Morgan Tsvangirai, the Zimbabwe leader of opposition at the time.
He had no trouble single-handedly criticizing far away countries like Libya, Syria and Iraq.
China became his past time nemesis as he continually railed against the country’s policy in Tibet and also across the waters of South China sea.
He almost allowed his friend, the Dalai Lama into Botswana had China not swiftly moved to draw a line in the sand.
The whole thing was in a way an aberration.
But it has fueled the reservations that Botswana faces today as it tries to compete in a fast changing world.
This week President Mokgweetsi Masisi will be in the United States chiefly for the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
This is a very important season for global networking.
Effectively every Head of State descends on New York.
The importance and relevance of each country is judged through a prism of diary of the leader; who he will be meeting and what the deliverables are for every meeting.
There was a little storm in a tea cup early in the week when an impression was created by this newspaper that many of president Masisi’s meetings in America will be virtual.
The pointy of the matter is that beyond his engagements at the United Nations, the president’s itinerary does not show much substance – certainly given |Botswana’s hardening economic realities.
This is in contrast with his Zambian colleague who will have a face time with Joe Biden, the president of the United States and also with Vice President Kamala Harris – a really coup and a really big deal by any standards.
Meetings with Senators and Congressmen and women at Capitol Hill have been scheduled for president Hakainde Hichilema.
Meetings with leaders of both the World Bank and International Monetary Fund will happen.
And perhaps tellingly, the president of Zambia will meet with Bob Menendez, chairman of the all-powerful United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The list is exhaustive. It includes business leaders and opinion makers.
Zambia is a country on the ascendance.
As one ruling party politician said to me during the week, Zambia are the new favorites.
And Botswana has fallen off the pedestal.
It has all to do with the way Hakainde Hichilema has conducted himself on his way up to power.
The United States has especially been paying attention to a seamless change of power between a ruling party and an opposition party that brought Hichilema to power.
Botswana has a growing list of big issues to address before it can regain its lost ground on the international scene.
Unlike before, Botswana has a much reduced room to maneuver diplomatically.
Botswana used to be a poster boy of Africa’s possibilities when leaders behaved well.
For more experienced diplomats and those that had been around when Botswana used to be touted by the West, latest events would no doubt feel like a “loss of face.”
As with many such similar cases when faced with the truth, Botswana’s true instinct these days is to look the other way.
Attempts to regain glory have generally been underwhelming, not least because the country has seen a spike in such evils like corruption and general malaise that have led many to even question government commitment to the rule of law.
Botswana government must start to honestly engage and even commiserate within itself about lost ground, especially how it happened but more importantly how to regain it.
The vaccine diplomacy surrounding international Covid-19 response, especially how Botswana has fared overall provides an excellent opportunity to be used as a case study by our diplomats.
Over the years Botswana has grown used to being showered with accolades by the international community.
Unlike Zimbabwe for example, Botswana has never really had to answer tough questions from the international community.
Instead it has been called an African miracle even as key indices like corruption and gross inequalities were being systematically glossed over.
A more recent grey-listing by the European Commission has come as a total shocker. And clearly Botswana government did not even know how to respond to such.
First the country tried to aggressively protest it, citing uneven handedness by the Europeans before switching tack and appealing to emotion, saying they have always been like a well-behaved schoolboy.
But Europe has remained steadfast and unmoved. They want to see concrete actions that are verifiable on money laundering. And before that happens Botswana will stay on the list.
France has also often labelled Botswana a tax haven on account of the country’s generous corporate tax under the International Financial Service Centre.
Again Botswana has always watched in horrified despair and helplessness.
Regionally Botswana Government is also showing vulnerabilities after an ill-advised decision to get aggressive with the South African government over the Mutual Legal Assistance for allegations of P100 billion that turned out to be a hoax.
It will take much more than a charm offensive to heal the raw wounds in South Africa.
So far, the presidency does not demonstrate that it fully grasps the seriousness of the fallout from the P100 billion fiasco – at least not publicly. They are biting the bullet, hoping that it too like several other things before it will go away on its own.
They are wrong. This is a big deal.
The political elite in South Africa across the length and breadth of the ruling African National Congress have a very low opinion of Masisi government.
Not only do they regard the president here as a political lightweight (which is unfair), his government’s decision to appoint a rightwing Afriforum as its legal representative in the dispute has been universally interpreted in South Africa as tone deaf and a bad joke.
