Former president Seretse Khama Ian Khama was left with an egg streaming down his face last week after he tried pulling a COVID-19 vaccine publicity stunt.
Through his SKI Khama Foundation, Khama claimed that through his “network of international partners”, he had secured two million doses each of Oxford-Astra-Zeneca and Pfizer BioNTech Covid 19 vaccines for Botswana” that he could deliver “immediately.” The Foundation named a company called KKM Global Group LLC as its contact for this deal. In negotiating this deal, the Foundation and the company kept the government in the dark. However, both parties later asked that same government to pay millions of pula for a consignment that would be delivered “immediately.”
The stunt appeared to be wholly designed to humiliate the government of President Mokgweetsi Masisi which has become notoriously ham-handed in its delivery of vaccines. As some viciously tore the deal apart, the Assistant Minister of Health and Wellness, Sethomo Lelatisitswe, quietly contacted the Pfizer office in South Africa to enquire further about KKM Global Group LLC and its role in the procurement of vaccines for governments. He attached in his enquiry, a letter in which KKM Global Group LLC claimed (to the Botswana government) to have secured 2 million vaccine doses for purchase.
In Pfizer’s response, Rhulani Nhlaniki (Cluster Lead Sub-Saharan Africa) states that going back to 2020, “we continue to only work with governments to supply vaccines.” While SKI Khama Foundation and KKM Global Group LLC have been keen to stress their working relationship with vaccine manufacturers, Nhlaniki states that Pfizer has no authorised private distributor of its vaccines worldwide, basically meaning that it has no working relationship with KKM Global Group LLC.
“The quality and efficacy of any vaccine moving through any non-authorised channels cannot be assured and should be viewed as suspect, potentially putting lives at risk,” Pfizer’s statement asserts.
The SKI Khama Foundation had made its announcement on August 9 and Lelatisitswe’s letter to Pfizer was written two days later – the response arrived the same day. That both these letters ended up on social media are evidence that Lelatisitswe is playing hard ball with Khama. The letters could very easily have remained confidential but the government seems to have decided that it is going to use Khama’s underhanded methods to fight and beat him.
The former president basically made a grand phony claim about an issue that is a constant source of embarrassment to the government. To boot, he padded such claim with patent falsehoods that have been very easy to disprove. The whole thing was a publicity stunt that fits a long-running pattern of such stunts by Khama. However, in failing to ensure that this one was properly designed, Khama not only humiliated himself but proved that he considers even a dire global public emergency to be fair game for purposes of political gamesmanship.