Thursday, June 19, 2025

Khama says bodyguards he rejected were hitmen, he was target

In an eventful week in which President Mokgweetsi Masisi and his predecessor, Ian Khama, appeared to be finally smoking the peace pipe, the latter has alleged that the former was actually planning to smoke him. Masisi and Khama found themselves in Luanda, Angola for a SADC summit. Masisi was attending in his official capacity as Botswana president and Khama in his personal capacity as the son of a SADC founding member, Sir Seretse Khama.

SADC was honouring Sir Seretse, who died in 1980, and Khama was in Luanda to receive the award of his father’s behalf. Also in Luanda was Brigadier Peter Magosi, the Director General of the Directorate of Intelligence and Security Services. According to Khama, Magosi (“who has been behind my persecution”) requested a meeting ahead of the summit.

When the two men (who first crossed paths in the Botswana Defence Force at the same time) met, Khama says that Magosi offered to provide him with three VIP bodyguards for the period of his stay in Angola. Khama turned down the offer and in terms of international standards of diplomatic courtesy, would have been provided with security by the Angolan government. While he turned down government’s offer, Khama would dramatically shake hands with Masisi after he received the award. The handshake led some to believe that the two rivals were finally reconciling. Not so, Khama told Sunday Standard.

“Would he have tried to reconcile after having sent Magosi the day before to offer me three bodyguards who were former members of the BDF, who were fired for misconduct and hired by Magosi to carry out their criminal intentions,” the former president said from South Africa where he had just returned from Angola. He wouldn’t say what sort of misconduct the alleged hitmen had been fired for but stated that he had been favoured with good intelligence about what their mission in Luanda was.

“For now my sources can only say it was intention to cause me harm. For me that can only mean one thing after they had intended to do the same had I returned for the Sir Seretse Khama Day commemoration last month,” said Khama adding that the information came from “reliable sources both in Botswana and South Africa” and that the harm directed at him “was to have had fatal consequences.”

Following a lobbying campaign by Bangwato, whom Khama is the supreme traditional leader of, Botswana honours Sir Seretse with a July 1 holiday. All along the event has been celebrated in Serowe but in 2021, when Sir Seretse would have turned 100 years, it was celebrated in Gaborone for the very first time. The real intention appears to have been to steal thunder from the Serowe event, which Khama headlined before fleeing to South Africa in November. Ahead of this year’s edition of the Day, Masisi sent an invitation card to Khama via his private office in Gaborone – the card asked the former president to wear formal. However, the invitation came amid another round of what has become ritualistic feuding between the current and former president.

Days earlier, Khama had published a dossier in which he accused Masisi of human rights violations and a relentless persecution campaign against him personally. The High Court was also seized with yet another legal tussle between Khama and the state. Through his lawyers, Khama had sought access to his official residence in Extension 5, Gaborone for his staff.  This came after DIS gained control of the residence, at one point, sealing it off with a crime-scene tape as part of its investigations. While Khama won the case, the court order was not implemented, causing the former to tell Sunday Standard at the time: “After winning a court case against DISS last week that grants my staff access to my official residence, the DISS have been instructed to defy the court order by denying access again because they heard I may return for the July 1 event and want to ensure I have nowhere to stay.”

Shortly thereafter, the SKI (Seretse Khama Ian) Foundation issued a statement that pointed out that while Khama had accepted Masisi’s invitation to attend the National Assembly event, his staff needed to be granted access to his official residence in order to prepare it for his occupation ahead of his arrival in Gaborone. More importantly, he needed firm guarantees that he wouldn’t be arrested. The statement revealed that Khama’s lawyers were in talks with government officials with regard to the latter. The talks failed.

“They would not give my lawyer any assurances for my wellbeing,” Khama said a day before the event in response to an enquiry from Sunday Standard about the outcome of the talks. Going back to at least 2020, Khama has always alleged that the government (in the persons of Masisi and Magosi) wants to kill him. Conversely, DISS – which would provide the hitmen – has denied that it has any such plans.

In the past, DISS’ Public Relations Director, Edward Robert has stated that in terms of the Intelligence and Security Services Act, the agency is mandated “to offer former presidents personal protection, not to harm let alone assassinate them.” He added that while Khama had been making those allegations in the media for a protracted period of time, nothing had happened to him. Indeed, the length of time that has elapsed would seem to be evidence that there is no plot to kill Khama. However, Khama himself interprets the lapse of time differently. He has alleged to Sunday Standard that whenever he travels in the country, there are DISS agents following him: “These guys will follow me and on the way, like in Mahalapye, another lot takes over.”

He sees a parallel with what happened to Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was poisoned some three months ago and had to be airlifted to a German hospital for special medical treatment. He (Khama) quotes a CNN report that says that Russian secret service followed Navalny for four years before they did anything to him. “You don’t get followed around for fun,” said Khama, a former Botswana Defence Force commander under whom DISS was established. “Obviously they do so to do something. It costs money and time and manpower. This expense is for a purpose. If they wanted information about where I am going they could just ask my DISS security to do so for them. The fact that they don’t speaks for itself.”

Last year, Khama told The Independent, a British newspaper, that he stopped patronising a certain restaurant that he used to frequent after learning of a plot to embed an assassin who would poison his food or drinks in the kitchen.  “Had I gone, I’ve no doubt they would have succeeded,” he said. The paper says that he mentioned polonium 210 (a hard-to-detect poison that killed Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko) as well as strychnine (a colourless, odourless pesticide) among chemicals that DISS had considered using to kill him. According to the paper, Khama had been handed a report by South African intelligence officials warning him “of state-sponsored attempts to kill him in the country he once led.”

The report outlined a plot to kill Khama before Botswana’s 2024 general election. Masisi himself has laughed off the accusations and speaking at a national meeting of the ruling Botswana Democratic Parry, rhetorically asked who between him and Khama is a killer. (Under Khama, DISS was rumoured to be a consistently humming killing machine.) Most interesting, however, is that the UN believes that the Botswana government does indeed want to kill Khama. In 2021, Agnes Callamard, then former United Nations special rapporteur for extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, wrote a report in which she explicitly stated that she found Khama’s allegations credible.

“The information received appears to be sufficiently reliable to raise serious concern about the risk to life of former president Ian Khama,” she wrote. “I am particularly concerned at the reported attempts on Mr Khama’s life by organs of the state corroborated by several sources.”

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