Some 2351 kilometres away from General Ian Khama’s birthplace of Surrey, England, in present-day Bulgaria, is a city called Nesebar. There lived Aesop, the famed Greek fabulist and storyteller who himself was born in 620 BC. Through the eponymous Aesop Fables, a collection of morality tales which was published in 260 BC, Aesop cautioned: “Be careful what you wish for.”
Many, many years later, when he had been successfully transplanted to Botswana and was now president, Khama wished for cloak-and-mostly-dagger spy outfit that would be called the Directorate of Intelligence and Security Services. The enormous output of the dagger work of this outfit would become the subject of one too many conversations that were held in hushed tones between acquaintances who absolutely trusted each other – and necessarily had to glance over their shoulders every 10 seconds for the entire duration of such conversations.
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