Why has the public been shell-shocked by President Ian Khama’s decisions to allow cabinet ministers charged with corruption to continue serving?
It’s partly because Batswana have still refused to accept corruption as a way of life, notwithstanding the fact that their government has moved far ahead to embrace corruption as routine; partly because they are suffused with infernal optimism that someday sanity will come back to their government; partly because the nation still cannot believe that the failures they are witnessing are happening under the watch of a man they have grown to regard as a national hero.
The tragedy though is that what we are witnessing is much more than an exercise in political theatre.
Rather, it is a real degeneration of our moral ethos.
It goes to the very heart of our dignity as a nation.
People feel not just belittled and taken for granted, but humiliated and psychologically abused by a government led by no man than they had accepted as an embodiment of greatness.
Like it or not, the government of Botswana has, over the last three years, been engaged in a fierce existential moral battle with itself.
And none of us has been spared.
As a nation, we had set the bars of expectation too high.
And, as it turned out, we put too much trust on a President who, while possessed with bouts and bouts of energy, was in all other respects an ordinary politician without a clue of what needed to be done to get the country running.
Never before has a president of this country done more to institutionalize corruption than Khama.
In his inaugural speech, Khama promised the nation that he would follow in the footsteps of his predecessors.
He said the only thing that could be different would be style.
We can now safely say that he was not only wrong, but deliberately misleading the nation.
In every sense, his government has departed from the path as set by his predecessors.
President Khama conspicuously lacks an understanding of just how important it is for a government to maintain a superior moral standing if it is to inspire confidence among the public, including among those citizens that despise it.
And a superior moral standing is not just confined to style. It extends as far deep as substance and material.
President Khama shows little, if any, appreciation of what is at stake when, out of clear egoism, a minister charged with corruption offences continues to serve as a minister of state.
Having sunk this deep, it may be time we all need to pause and ask ourselves if this is Botswana we always wanted for ourselves.
We have become a banana republic. More importantly, we have to ask ourselves just how we arrived at a situation where, out of sheer determination for survival, we now have a leadership that has exempted itself from all moral responsibilities that go with being a leader.
The English people would say it’s like Alice in Wonderland.
My view has always been that the internal politics of the governing Botswana Democratic Party are of great interest to all of us, including those of us who have never attended a single BDP internal meeting.
Having literally submerged the BDP under his weight, Ian Khama is now going for a much bigger target: the country and, with it, the nation.
And from the look of things, our defences are too meek to withstand a strong-willed and ruthlessly determined man whose real and true goals for this country he has all but kept to himself and to a small but fiercely loyal and unaccountable inner circle of moneymen that continue to goad him to turn his back against all reason.
After four years in power, it is time we rigorously debated and interrogated Khama’s record, especially against the promises and yardsticks that he had set for himself.
One does not need to be an economist to determine that while Khama has endlessly called for frugality, prudence, patriotism, selflessness and delivery, over the last four years he has himself presided over a wasteful government with all the corruption it engenders.
A quick audit of the President’s lifestyle produces results that stand in stark contrast to his pretence that there is need for economic recovery before anybody’s salary in government could be adjusted.
We have a president asking all of us to tighten our belts while he is himself not wearing any belt at all.
The decision to allow Vincent Seretse to keep his post as a junior minister flies against all the known principles of clear-sighted morality.
There is a history to it.
The Minister of Finance, Ken Matambo, was also allowed to do the same; attend court sessions in the morning and government business in the afternoon.
The upshot of it was a double disaster that drained the moral authority, not just of Matambo but also his employer while inciting a presidentially orchestrated loss of public faith in such institutions like DCEC (Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime) and DPP (Directorate of public Prosecutions).
Personally, I have grave reservations about the sanity of some of the people in charge of this country.
When faced with a crisis, their instinct is usually to be defensive.
They view the Directorate of Public Prosecutions as out to collapse Khama’s government, which is altogether more insane when one considers that in a functional democracy, government or, more to the point, the President should be the last person to lose faith in the system that he presides over.
The stakes are unacceptably too high to allow Seretse as minister while also sitting on the dock to answer to charges of corruption.
Cabinet has something called collective responsibility, which under Khama has been stretched to new limits.
By allowing Seretse to keep his post, it follows that every morning he walks into the dock then the entire government, of which he remains a part of, is also facing the same charges of corruption.
