Long before her revelatory book was published, Margaret Nasha was behind the scenes waging a protracted war with the executive.
A long time cabinet minister herself, upon election as Speaker of the National assembly she had made it her crusade to wean parliament away the overarching control of the executive.
Getting parliament outside the shadow of Parliament was never going to be easy.
It was an agenda that would drive her to cross paths with the most powerful on the land.
She had become the Speaker of Parliament under Ian Khama’s presidency.
Her election as Speaker was a result of horse trading agreement that was hatched and then negotiated for her by former President Festus Mogae.
It was as a condition for her accepting to serve as Mogae’s Minister of Local Government.
During those days, local government portfolio was considered a poisoned chalice that was cutting many political careers short and few ministers were willing to taste it.
After Mogae’s departure, Khama kept his word and appointed Nasha the Speaker of Parliament.
From early on she fully understood the challenges ahead.
She internalized the pitfalls, weighed and mapped the risks.
And as it turned out, she went into it all not only well prepared but also with her eyes wide open.
As it was, she became the public face of a five year tussle for supremacy between parliament and the executive.
By the time it was over she was out of luck and out of work, having fallen out of favour with the very President that had in the first instance agreed to get her appointed Speaker.
Nasha’s five year struggle against Khama was predicated by her conviction that the independence of parliament was something that was not negotiable.
She also fancied it was long overdue.
A former senior member of the executive, she called for parliamentary oversight with a swagger that took many by surprise.
She took offence with the fact that Parliament was run from the Office of the President.
She was unrepentant in her belief that Members of Parliament had to employ their own staff, including up to the Clerk of the National Assembly.
Salaries for Members of Parliament, she openly told that could listen to her, was a matter that had to be settled by members after consulting not the Office of the President, but Minister of Finance who had a better pulse on the economy.
Inevitably, this did not sit down well with the President and those surrounding him who immediately interpreted this as unprovoked war by a Speaker who was on collision course.
Nasha’s determination was one thing, actually getting it done quite another.
There were two options to achieve her goals.
The first and much more difficult was coming up with new laws.
This repelled her because those laws would ultimately require the assenting signature of the State President.
That on its own was unattractive enough as the President would never append his signature to any piece of law the cumulative effect of which was to reduce cabinet control and by extension his own power on Parliament.
An easier way out, Nasha figured, was to change the Parliamentary Standing Orders.
After consulting her lawyers in parliament she was relieved to learn that changing the Standing Orders did not require a change of the existing laws.
To get the ball rolling she assembled members of the back bench from across the spectrum.
In clear terms she told them what her ambition was, and in her typical burst of laughter ended up by telling the Members of Parliament present that her only worry was that was she was about to do would in the end cost her reelection to her position.
It did not bother her much.
To her excitement there consensus that parliamentary independence which had hirtherto only been in word was afterall worth the risks.
The next stage was to assemble a specific parliamentary committee that would look at all the Standing Orders and come up with suggestions for reforms.
To chair that Committee, Nasha appointed Daniel Kwelagobe, her long time friend from their school days.
Her choice of Kwelagobe was not accidental. While the duo had in the recent past crossed paths over their fight for position of Secretary General, they were old time soul mates.
From their school days at Gaborone Secondary School to their days as cub reporters at the Department of Information and Broadcasting, they had travelled together for far too, including to England, to hold grudges against each other for long.
Nasha appreciated the fact that Kwelagobe was a gifted retail politician.
After over forty years in Parliament, Kwelagobe had grown to internalize the parliamentary Standing Orders.
She also liked Kwelagobe for the fact that he knew the rules governing parliament like the palm of his hands. His back bencher colleagues deferred to him while cabinet ministers simply held him in awe.
A constitutionalist to the core, he was most of all unwavering in his belief that Standing Orders were sacrosanct and that they should be observed and implemented to the letter.
To add the cherry on top, Kwelagobe also had an axe to grind with President Khama.
It all had to with the manner with which he had been forced to exit cabinet, which many considered humiliating as it was demeaning.
Close associates say he learnt about his sacking over radio while on a party business in Kasane.
By the time he arrived at the airport back in Gaborone all the trappings of power, including a driver and an official car had been taken withdrawn.
His sacking, passed euphemistically on state media as a resignation was the culmination of a long tussle for control of the party with President Khama. Kwelagobe was National Chairman of the BDP, a position he had assumed upon leaving that of Secretary General that he had occupied for twenty seven years.
To cut Kwelagobe out of the power axis, the President had given his ministers an ultimatum to choose between cabinet and party executive positions.
All but Kwelagobe chose cabinet.
As the longest serving Member of Parliament, his colleagues deferred to him, and called him the “Father of the House.”
Assisted by some of his prot├®g├®s like Kentse Rammidi, the veteran politician handled the parliamentary reform exercise assigned them by Nasha with meticulous execution.
Other than amending Standing Orders, Kwelagobe came up with a suggestion that established a suite of committees. It was much more than Nasha had asked for.
The most powerful among such committee was to be the one called Parliamentary Special Select Committee.
It was empowered to investigate government companies, ministries and parastatals.
During Nasha’s tenure the Committee was to investigate corruption allegations at Botswana Development Corporation and also at Botswana Meat Commission.
In both instances, the findings were damning and embarrassing, not only because they confirmed corruption but because in the instance of BDC, one minister, Ken Matambo was virtually implicated to have been complicit.
By that time Khama had had enough of Nasha’s designs.
A curfew order was placed on her international official travels.
But still she persisted and oversaw the drafting of three Bills that had they been passed would have dealt the final blow of executive control over parliament.
Still the worst was to come.
By the time Nasha published her book, which was effectively an insider’s account confirming what had hirtherto been public suspicions of Khama’s leadership weaknesses, the die was cast.
Some in the BDP started nudging on Khama to get her removed before the end of her term.
To his credit, President Ian Khama resisted the temptation and went public to say, Nasha, together with her Deputy at the time, Pono Moatlhodi who had started dabbling with defecting to opposition UDC would be allowed to serve the rest of her time.
Nasha’s book was for President Khama a hard pill to swallow. And he was clearly burning inside.
Instead of taking Nasha’s criticism in a civil manner, he used a BDP gathering to hit back, effectively accusing her of adultery.
She responded by reminding all that it was all about reelection and that she was afterall still in the race.
To add a cherry on top she said she looked forward to a day when Botswana would have a directly elected President so that she too could have her name inside the ring.
By that time some were beginning to question her sanity.
But true to her word and against all odds she put her name for reelection of Speaker. She casually if brashly brushed aside calls for to withdraw her name. Not even a somewhat confusing court case that preceded the election of Speaker daunted her.
Last week she finally lost against the president’s choice but woke to insist that she was not bitter.
“I am very much aware that the BDP MPs who had previously vouched to support my candidacy, found themselves in a very difficult situation. I wish I could have saved them from that unfortunate dilemma; and even though some of them tried to persuade me to throw in the towel yesterday, I would not be moved at the cost of my integrity, principles and beliefs. My stance was about doing what in my view was the right thing to do. I must therefore publicly congratulate and thank the sole BDP member who had the courage and forthrightness to continue to believe in my abilities and cast his/her vote in my support as previously pledged,” she told the media a day after she lost.
