You have to give it to President Mokgweetsi Masisi.
He never ceases to surprise.
This past week he sneaked out of the country to go and get a rest in the United States.
He is on a holiday after taking what his people call a private leave.
Before going on leave he saw no need to tell the nation that he would be away on a holiday.
The Masisi defence forces are saying there is absolutely nothing wrong with what has happened.
Give the man a break, they are saying almost in unison.
He has been hard at work, they shout at those questioning the behaviour of our president.
The conclusion is that the nation will only be told about the president’s whereabouts on a need-to-know-basis.
Thus the nation was only told about the president’s leave when questions were raised about the president’s whereabouts – almost a week after he had left the country.
A professor from my days at the university is having a field day.
On three different occasions and in different conversations he has sought to question the president’s sanity. He genuinely believes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the president.
In all occasions I have gone out of my way to defend the president.
Sneaking out of the country is now being touted by the professor as irrefutable proof that there is something amiss with the president.
“Do you still believe that this guy is fine?” was the first question from the professor when he called.
According to vice president Slumber Tsogwane, the president has done nothing wrong.
Tsogwane says the president has been doing lots of travel and working very had recently, and deserves to rest.
I have a lot of respect for Tsogwane. I have long come to accept that my love for him is more out of bias than anything else.
I just have a soft spot for him.
Despite popular opinion, I still believe he is smart and politically astute.
In fact I believe that without Tsogwane, the Masisi government would have long unravelled, chiefly because Masisi has a short concentration span and more crucially because he is seldom serious even when dealing with serious national matters.
But on this one I think Tsogwane has gone too far. He is mistaking Batswana for buffoons.
The way the president sneaked out of the country demonstrates moral failure at the top of our political leadership. The list of people who accompanied him makes the whole trip even more unpardonable.
But more ominous is the fact that his defence forces see nothing wrong.
They are not apologizing. In fact they are doubling down on a narrative that the president had to go on a holiday.
Maybe we are whirling a storm in a teacup.
But we cannot continue like this forever. Something has got to give.
Masisi and his government have to start taking Batswana more seriously.
We cannot have a president sneaking out of the country in an official aeroplane full of friends masquerading as officials and expect the nation to turn a blind eye or say everything is in order.
Perhaps the clever people at the Office of the president are right in saying that the president has been working hard and needed a rest.
But in politics, as in everything else optics mean a lot.
At the moment the nation is seized with an unprecedented crisis presented by rising cost of living.
People are really struggling and finding it hard to just get by.
Things are moving at a fast pace. And the economy is deteriorating at an alarming rate.
Fiddling while Rome is on fire has never sounded more apt.
Masisi really did not need to do a lot to become a better president than Ian Khama.
Khama had set the bar too low, yet almost on a daily basis Masisi is pushing towards being worse than Ian Khama.
So far the president is getting all the big calls wrong.
All his mistakes can easily be traced to a cavalier attitude towards integrity and ethical propriety.
Some people have said he is being given wrong advice.
The president does not need any advice.
He just has to go and watch his campaign speeches ahead of the 2019 General Elections and he will have all sense of what he needs to do.
The 2019 campaign was when many of us willed Masisi to be what we wanted him to be.
After Khama, somehow we believed that Masisi was going to be the Messiah, sent by God to save us all.
A few called us to caution. We disagreed and instead wanted to skin them alive as we drowned and shouted them down.
On and on we draped Masisi with all the accolades. We called him a pragmatist.
We called him a liberal. We pushed people to believe that there was more to him than just the oratory skills.
Strangely, our first impressions of the man were all wrong.
Here we are today as we are all over running for cover.
Our man got power but is failing miserably to exercise power.
We imagined he was driven by self-belief and a love for service. It turns out he was driven by an ambition to revenge.
He has surrounded himself with people who do not understand power itself. And every day they take perceived opponents to prison cells on the flimsiest of charges for interrogation.
Egotism and arrogance are now on display.
How on earth did we believe that our man he was a humble man?
How did we reach the conclusion that he would be anti-corruption?
How did we reach the conclusion that he would have at heart the plight of the poor and the vulnerable among us?
Just how did we get so many things wrong?
We disregarded the advice of those who had been in close contact with the man before he became a public figure – that his instincts are often tribal in nature. And here we are, paying the price for it.
Wrongly, we believed that he would be aware of his limitations and thus surround himself with more capable people to help him steer both country and government. Yet we have seen him chuck out more capable people he felt were sympathetic to his predecessor. The whole thing has been nothing less than a purge.
We wrote in praise of him. The mood was at its best. Everything seemed to be working in his favour and the nation hummed along, believing somehow that it was destiny playing its course.
Here we are today. All of us ashamed and even embarrassed every time he does something illiberal like keeping people in jail cells way beyond the statutory limits.
Everyday his security apparatus breaks the laws. And he looks the other way.
We now have an egg on our faces, tormented by what the English people call a buyer’s remorse.
But opting to sneak out for a holiday in the United States while Botswana is facing a growing number of really big economic challenges is the latest in a series of really poor judgements on the part of our president.
Put together, all such bad calls make Botswana look firmly under way to becoming a true Banana Republic.
