President Mokgweetsi Masisi should move swiftly to give back the guns his government seized from Wildlife Anti-Poaching Unit ÔÇô whatever it takes.
May be the reasons for seizing these arms from the Unit were after-all benign, to use his favorite word, but what Masisi’s decision has in effect done has been to throw red meat to his adversaries.
We shall never know for sure what information his security and intelligence advisers had picked, but his strategy to resort to legalese cannot carry him too far.
It practical terms his line of argument at best sounds like an apology and at worst an alibi.
For a debate that has been so badly tainted with politics, he should climb down. It would not be defeat ÔÇô not by any measure. It would be tactical.
Now an experienced political operator with many scalps to his name, Masisi should know that in politics it is not what you say, but rather what you choose not to say that people ultimately believe.
His explanation for the decision he took has been drowned by a powerful crescendo of doubt, innuendo and outright hostile barrage of untruths from his opponents.
Where he chooses to deploy evidence-based arguments, his detractors have intuitively elected to use propaganda.
Where he has decided to be level-headed, his opponents have been posturing, grandstanding and populist inclined.
Where he has chosen to be measured in his tone, his opponents have been wildly shriveled and hyperbolic.
Masisi has a lot of analytical depth. But because this whole argument is not rules-based, this is not a debate that he will win by digging deep into his intellect.
He has to pick his fights carefully.
When it comes to what is at stake, not even facts are held as sacrosanct ÔÇô not even by people we would under normal circumstances call scientists.
If the bogus 87-elephants saga is to be remembered for anything it is that when it comes to money, even scientists are willing to sacrifice their reputations, their professions, their ethics and their integrity.
Thus it would be naïve on the part of President Masisi to assume that on this matter, honesty alone will carry him through the day.
The president has been shiftless in his position that the Wildlife Anti-poaching Unit carried those weapons illegally.
May be he is right.
But still, to resort to law under the prevailing air that is full of chicanery and outright untruthfulness is to further complicate what is already a muddled public debate.
The net effect of his line of argument has been to isolate even his own base of supporters.
When it comes to taking away the military grade guns from the Department of Wildlife, not even the staunchest of Masisi supporters have been convinced by the reasons he has so publicly proffered.
If anything they have been subliminally dismayed by their hero.
It may well be that there are other security related issues that cannot be divulged publicly, but certainly another way could have been designed to deal with those. There have been murmurs for example that some interests were busy working at creating personal militias using their access to some of the militarized units.
But still the president should move swiftly to state in precise terms exactly when he intends to formalize the legal structures to allow the well trained wildlife units to once again carry these much needed weapons.
Over and above empowering the unit with new legal instruments, he must also ret-train them how to treat local people found in the vicinity of these wildlife management areas, including Basarwa of the Central Kalahari game reserve who have been by far the victims of most abuse that passes for conservation.
So called conservationists are hoodwinking Batswana and in some instances the world into believing that under President Mokgweetsi Masisi Botswana has become a conservation terrorist state.
For them the whole of Botswana should be preserved as a monument of beauty where elephants, lions and giraffes roam freely.
They treat this country like it was some amusement park.
If that was not so they would not have missed the point that for a majority of Batswana, of overriding concern is not the fake news story of 87 killed elephants, but rather the death, destruction, misery and human suffering visited on our people on a daily basis by high numbers of elephants that have now started to intrude deeper into human settlements.
Areas where elephants have until recently never been heard of, have all of a sudden become their familiar paths ÔÇô there not just to graze but also kill the defenceless people and also destroy both their property and livelihood.
Assuming the faked story of 87 elephants was true, these are the people who would not shed a tear for the alleged massacre, but would instead wonder to themselves why all the farce for what to them is such a disproportionately small number allegedly killed given the country’s immensely and now unsustainable elephant population!
These are the people who believe not without a reason that the Botswana’s elephant herd population has by far overshot its habitat.
These are the people who have been forgotten by the policies of Ian Khama, the famed conservation messiah who so badly disappointed the people of CKGR after they had put so much faith in him when he came into power.
