The perennial display of a disconnect between Government and office of former president Ian Khama is much more than a passing event.
It should be viewed as an existential threat to the incumbent president Mokgweetsi Masisi. A failure to act will leave current president badly exposed.
Recent confusion surrounding the appointment of Isaac Kgosi as Private Secretary to former president is just one example of strained relations.
No need to enumerate other such similar examples.
Spinning and political posturing might postpone political reckoning, but never halt it forever.
During his time, Khama would take a serious offence any perception of insubordination from a former president ÔÇô however minute or innocuous.
Yet he sees nothing wrong when it is him undermining a sitting Head of State.
Ever since his retirement the office of the former president has been picking fight with the incumbent.
The public is watching the unfolding saga with a mixture of disquiet and fascination.
Disquiet because they do not want to see such a brazen challenge of a serving President.
Fascination because they would like to see just to see Masisi prove that he is his own man.
Public patience is not infinite.
When that patience reaches breaking point, more difficult questions will be asked ÔÇô for either Masisi or Khama.
Masisi will be asked why he had had to put up with all the nonsense without using the might of state power.
The public will not sympathise with him much less forgive him for cutting the image of a beleaguered Head of State.
Such weakness in politics is unpardonable. And it neither attracts nor begets any compassion.
Khama will be asked to account for his lack of grace.
Whatever the answers in the end there can only be one winner.
At the height of the public service strike in 2011, Khama dispatched his then deputy General Mompati Merafhe to cut former presidents to sides.
The rapacious Merafhe could not have asked for a juicier assignment.
He rudely told Sir Ketumile Masire that his unsolicited advice to government was no longer welcome.
At the of their conversations, he told the ageing statesman that henceforth he should not make any calls. If any input from his was needed, he would be called.
Naturally Masire was touched.
But then that kind of typified Khama’s relationship with his predecessors, who on more than one occasion he threatened to have their perks reduced.
While Khama was during his time too eager to let his predecessors to slide into oblivion, he so clearly is unwilling to allow the same fate to befall him.
For a man who never wanted to share public glamour, political power and space with predecessors he now seems abnormally too eager to not only overcrowd his own successor but also delay the natural process of the sun setting on him.
Khama, to be honest has always viewed himself as a force of nature that will always sway its way around.
The imperial presidency that he created, while by no doubt the pinnacle of his lifelong infrastructure he created during his long public service, was for him by no means the end of it.
Hence he still wants to stay atop an ivory tower that he built believing that never shall a day come when he will have to descend.
But the collision course he is setting himself up against a sitting Head of State risks bursting the Utopian bubble he has lived in all his life.
In Botswana ÔÇô and this much Khama would be the first to conclude ÔÇô in a fight involving a sitting Head of State there is always only one winner.
Nothing has changed since the day he left.
Botswana is a vast country. And there is enough room for former president to co-exist with incumbent.
All they need do is to defer to him. And avoid at all cost meddling.
Sponsoring candidates who are under instruction to undermine the incumbent president is not the best form of political retirement.
Khama says his passions include philanthropy and conservation.
He should follow his passions and stay away from politics.
That is the shortest route to statesmanship.
Khama likes to wave his patriotism and also his love for the country.
“This is the only Botswana that we have,” he used to say.
Any vexed cold war with incumbent president is not the best proof of patriotism.
