Even under the best of times, campaigning to become the Chair of the African Union Commission is a high stakes undertaking.
And for Botswana, these are hardly the best times.
Given her experience, Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi knew from the start what she was putting herself into.
And given a strong political antennae, she no doubt saw it coming.
By Monday afternoon it was clear that things at the African Union headquarters were not going to go her way.
Venson-Moitoi should hold her head high.
Her campaign was not an easy feat.
It has provided her with invaluable experience, mainly on the practicalities, on the rules (written and un-written) of international diplomacy.
And she will use those experiences in her future pursuits.
We wish her well. And hope that notwithstanding the outcome, she will be at peace with herself.
The people who vote for the Chair of the African Union Commission are Heads of State or their direct representatives.
Botswana’s delegation there was led by a Vice President.
It means that we did not send the most powerful delegation available to us as a country.
The other delegates were assistant ministers and ordinary Members of Parliament.
This is not serious enough given what we were up against.
Our delegation did not match the kind of ambitions we had imposed on ourselves by putting up a candidate.
We do not want to believe we set Venson-Moitoi to fail.
But increasingly it has looked like that.
International and multilateral organizations like the United Nations, Ufrican Union, ECOWAS, SADC, and other regional organisations are highly hierarchical bodies.
Hierarchy and level of position in Government are taken very seriously.
A president or Head of State visiting the AU would take it as an affront and even demeaning if another country was to request a meeting for any official of lesser standing from another country.
Presidents want to meet with Presidents, nothing less.
Venson-Moitoi has been at pains to tell the country that she has all the backing she has ever needed from President Ian Khama.
Nothing is farther away from the truth.
Campaigning for these positions involves a lot more than phone calls or sending letters bearing the president signature. Making a few phone calls and writing letters is about all that the President did for Venson-Moitoi’s campaign.
Such campaigns involve flying around African capitals by a Head of State who wants his or her citizen given the position.
It involves face to face peer meetings, including making difficult tradeoffs in return for one’s vote.
Such tradeoffs often need to be made at the impulse. And they can only be made by a Head of State who does not need to go back home to request or make reports.
That is what has been lacking in Venson-Moitoi’s campaign.
For the umpteenth time, we have to say that Venson-Moitoi is perfectly qualified to take that position.
But so then were all the other contenders.
It cannot be right then for Botswana to assume that she was somehow entitled to win. Or that for some reason, it was now finally Botswana’s time for a place at the top table.
Botswana has always had a lot of goodwill around the globe.
But we would be fooling ourselves if we said that we still are the darling of the world the same way that we used to be.
A lot has happened around the world.
International geopolitics has moved at a pace against which we have clearly not coped.
And we have also had our own shortcomings as manifested through our current foreign policy which goes in tangent with our neighbours including with many other African countries.
The attitude of our President towards the world is often that of a person who is in full control of events.
That is wrong. Even the most powerful leader in the world can never be in full control of global events.
The best they can do is to try and influence those events and bend them as much as possible to their way.
That is what President Khama’s attitude towards the African Union should have been.
He should have attended and personally argued his case before his peers on behalf of Venson-Moitoi.
The President’s direct and personal involvement in such matters as attempts made by Venson-Moitoi is not optional. Rather it is an absolute necessity.
There is no guarantee that he would have persuaded them one way or another.
But he would never be accused, at least fairly, of neglecting his responsibilities.
The president’s failure to be at the African Union at the crunch time no doubt played a key role in Venson-Moitoi’s shortfall.
