Things are definitely not humming up for President Mokgweetsi Masisi.
He is not where he was in the build-up to General Elections in 2019.
This time four years ago Masisi was walking on water.
There was a lot of hope. And a lot of optimism.
There was an aura of new politics about him.
He was so believable. And people genuinely thought he represented not just the future, but a clean break with the past as symbolized by his immediate predecessor, Ian Khama.
More crucially, Masisi had surrounded himself with politically sophisticated people who wanted him to win.
They too believed in his vision.
Four years on, Masisi presidency is bogged down – paralysed by a senseless obsession with Ian Khama.
He also seems alone and lonely.
He has cast to the side an entire team that helped him win state power in 2019.
He always sees wrong in people.
He does not seem to ever ask himself if he could actually be the problem.
He is now surrounded by cheerleaders.
And worse, he is now not in control but at the mercy of events that he started.
There is a lot of fatalism about this government.
Early warning signs hint that peace might be starting to desert the paradise.
To say that too many people are disappointed with the president is an understatement.
At election time he had oversold himself.
Performance has not matched public expectations.
Along the way there has been a reset. We are at a stage where we might have to start thinking about resetting the reset.
There is some truth in that his presidency was really disoriented by a pandemic that turned the world on its head.
But even allowing for Covid-19, this government has struggled to gain traction and has often seemed out of its breath.
Just last week the ruling party Secretary General finally relented to pressure turned on him by the president for more than a year and announced that he would not be defending his position.
A string of emissaries had been sent to him nudging him that the president no longer wanted him as Secretary General. The intention was to get him to resign.
Mpho Balopi resisted all attempts to get him out. That annoyed the president even more.
Signs of cracks at the centre showed last December when he resigned his position in cabinet.
It was as it turned out, a good political move because it had become clear he was going to be sacked down the line.
By resigning Balopi denied Masisi the pleasure of sacking him.
Masisi remains the president – a year short of the half-way mark of the maximum tenure allowed by the constitution.
And as one senior business executive told me last December, in Botswana the president is God.
The fight that started with the Masisi presidency seems set to see that presidency come to an end.
The fight against Khama has defined the Masisi presidency.
When it started, we thought it was a new president trying to prove that he was no pushover against a strongman predecessor.
That was not be.
As with many other things, this one variable that has dominated the Masisi presidency is far short on nuisances. It is possible we are witnessing a macho contest between two narcissists that have simply fallen out.
While Masisi is often exhibited caution on other issues, when it comes to Ian Khama he has thrown it all out through the window – forgetting that as a sitting president he has much more to lose than Ian Khama.
The fight does not make sense at all.
Not least because it is between a mentor and a protégé.
The biggest strength for Masisi was always a demonstrable attachment to reality.
He seemed to care for the welfare of the people.
Since winning his own full term in 2019 that attachment to reality seems to have deserted him.
He takes everything for granted. And those close to him say he now cares most about his personal exploits.
He does not seem to care about things that really matter to people; education, public health and access to land.
His biggest project is to defeat Ian Khama – however that defeat looks like.
The fight against Khama has been a big and costly distraction for Masisi.
If there was no such fight, the likelihood is that Masisi would be a much more focused president.
Now he is forced to always be looking over own shoulder.
This makes him paranoid and forces him to micromanage government – another recipe for failure.
Make no mistake, Khama has very little personal popularity left as a politician.
But he still has a lot of sway as a traditional leader among his people, many of who still harbour ancient attitudes that are actually remnants of feudalism, in their views of who they are vis-a–vis other people.
But that is not for Masisi to prosecute much less wage a war over – to the detriment of all of Botswana.
Time is running out for Masisi. Four years out of a possible ten is a very significant chunk.
He needs to decide what he wants to achieve with what is left of his time in office.
For now he seems more animated by his power and less concerned by the delivery aspect of his government. That must change
He needs to enhance debate at the cabinet table.
At the moment the cabinet table is littered with men of straw that are so publicly beholden to him because he made them cabinet ministers.
