A little over two weeks ago, President Ian Khama announced that he was appointing Edwin Batshu to the position of Acting Minister – Defence, Justice and Security.
We have no problem with Batshu’s capabilities.
In fact, under Khama, many more people much less capable than Batshu have found their way into cabinet either because they were Khama’s political allies or they were people made of straw, by hook or crook, prepared to do his bidding without giving the president the slightest discomfort of asking even the most innocuous of questions.
The most plausible of the President’s intensions is that Batshu will stay in that position until such time that Ndelu Seretse resolves his problems with the law and comes back to reclaim his position, by which time Batshu will most likely become a junior minister, possibly replacing Mbiganyi Tibone who has had enough with the drama.
While Seretse’s ongoing corruption case provides only a part of the explanation, there are other greater risks and pitfalls at play.
It is our ardent hope that Ian Khama is well advised; in this instance, by the Attorney General even though it’s public knowledge that in him we have a President who enjoys seeking official legal opinion from sources other than the Attorney General.
A failure to appoint a replacement for Seretse provides a fodder for accusations, however unfounded, that President Khama is meddling in the operations of the judiciary.
Just what gives him the absolute confidence that Ndelu Seretse will win his case so much so that a cabinet position is so explicitly and so shamelessly reserved for the accused?
Khama’s bizarre behavior to literally put the government business on hold so that his cousin can sort out his troubles with the law codifies and entrenches a widely held belief that contrary to all his pretensions and public posturing as a fair-minded man, the President places unreasonably higher premium on loyalty and trust than on practicality and pragmatism.
Khama needs to admit one big failure, a failure that will haunt him and undermine his legacy long after he has left the Presidency and has ceased to matter at all. That failure is to treat all his party members and colleagues even handedly.
It is this failure that, by the way, led to a devastating split of the ruling party ÔÇô the first split in the party’s almost 50-year-old history.
This though provides only a small part of our discomfort with the way President Ian Khama has handled the whole thing.
We want to underline the fact that we have no quarrel with the current arrangement where cabinet appointments are the prerogative of the President and where ministers serve entirely at the pleasure of the President.
While unfairness is a truly neuralgic word in this foregoing debate, there is yet another dimension to it.
The legality, or should we say constitutionality, of the whole affair is suspect.
In here we have a serious problem sparing Khama.
We have not even an inclination to extend him the benefit of doubt.
Not the least for it was the same President who less than two years ago gladly and so publicly savoured the benefits of a legal victory based on technicality that a sitting president cannot be dragged before the courts.
Without listening to the merits of the case, Gomolemo Motswaledi’s attempts to challenge the potentially ultra-vires actions of Khama following the BDP Kanye Congress in 2009 were thrown out the window by the courts.
We expect a man who enjoys such unbridled protection from the laws of the country to be more circumspect in the application of the same laws lest he be found to be treading on the wrong side.
We hear that Edwin Batshu, former Commissioner of Police, has been appointed in acting capacity.
But for whom is he acting, because in our knowledge there has been no substantive minister since Seretse’s stepped aside.
This is a key issue that we hope both the Attorney General and the President, especially the President, will clarify.
When he took office, Khama took an oath not only to uphold the constitution of Botswana but to also defend it.
We take serious offence when the same man engages in theatrics that border on violating the same constitution he is supposed to defend and uphold.
No wonder Batshu’s appointment was met with no enthusiasm, not even from Khama’s traditional cheer leaders.
The derision that greeted the appointment was ÔÇô to be fair ÔÇô not so much about Batshu, but rather about the hollowness of his acting capacity.
