The biggest show in town is fast taking shape.
It is double-pronged.
And arriving from the United States on Wednesday President Mokgweetsi Masisi was in a mean mood. And visibly angry. He knows what is coming his way.
And his instinct is to be combative and fight fire with fire.
He fired pre-emptive strikes and took no prisoners. He was all out to call out his critics and show who was in charge.
But issues facing him are much more complex and complicated than that.
Moruti Tiego’s antics, which have so clearly gotten under the president’s thin skin were only a dress rehearsal, a sideshow if you want.
There are bigger issues to worry about.
There is a motion of “no Confidence” coming up the president’s way.
He is by all measures most likely to survive it, but it will cause him political harm.
The motion is all calculated to embarrass him, humble him and bring him back to earth.
The State of Emergency has come to an end. With that has ended all the arbitrary powers he has been using to run the country.
Mass retrenchments have started as we speak.
Public hardships will soon turn into political resentment, much of it directed at him. Its the early days yet.
There is also a cold war brewing between the president and his governing party Secretary General.
The two have gone different ways.
And depending on how it all ends up, political careers and ambitions could be lost.
This is a big one and A lot is riding on how it ends.
The reality is that there is no controlled war.
One mistake and everything spirals out of control.
But given the pragmatism of people with power and a lot they stand to lose should everything go out of control, sanity might just prevail.
It might end up with in a damp squib – with not a single shot fired as protagonists opt instead to share the spoils in order to cling on to the bigger prize; power. They might choose to go the route that the French call Le grande tableau – the bigger picture.
Still, the stakes have never been higher.
Neither of the two chief protagonists wants or is ready for an all-out war.
On paper the president has an upper hand. But nobody is definitively sure of victory.
In the meantime the governing Botswana Democratic Party is showing symptoms of a siege mentality.
The next few weeks will be very instructive.
There will be a lot of activity as the two camps vie for the soul of the party.
President Mokgweetsi Masisi is fighting wars in too many fronts. He is a distracted president.
The recent appointment of the party subcommittee on communication and publicity provides a few succinct signals of what the president is looking for.
He is going for absolutism.
He has packed the sub-committee with war-hardened and too often irrational attack dogs.
A long time back, some of these hotheads used to sit in the same committee with the man who has now just appointed them to the same committee.
Many in the committee will be too happy to go to war. And few of them will even care much less plan how to exit.
The committee is deliberately crafted some strong personalities with big egos.
It is not an exaggeration to say soon they will be trying to out-compete each other on who loves the party and country most among themselves.
But based on the names chosen there is no second guessing what outcome the president is looking for.
He is obviously worried about the party messaging which has been weak and abstract.
On social media recently the BDP has often been overrun by opposition.
The president, if he could get his way wants to reverse that.
He wants to shock and awe the enemy – whoever the enemy might be.
Some of the names brought back into the committee had in the recent past walked away from defending the party, obviously, like many other BDP activists after feeling sidelined.
In the meantime the war machine is getting ready.
The president expects maximum protection for his office, for himself, for the party and for government.
Will they go on a combat and dig the ditch deeper?
Most probably.
Few in the sub-committee are contemplative enough to want to the think before writing a post in defence of the leader and/or the party on social media.
And even fewer of them are analytical enough to want to differentiate between party and government.
Thus, in the ensuing dust the line dividing party and government is going to get ever more blurred.
Renowned psychologist and author, professor Stephen Pinker says that “people tend to approach challenges either as problem-solving or as conflict.”
At least taken at face value, the president’s choice of people on the sub-committee signals the demeanour of a man preparing for conflict.
If that is true, all caution will in the next few weeks be thrown out of the window.
Details are yet to emerge of what really went so badly wrong between the president and his Secretary General.
The two former allies are now it seems ready for a scotched-earth policy.
The Secretary General supporters speak of a president whose every decision is centred around his fight against predecessor Ian Khama.
They accuse him of megalomania, paranoia and insecurity.
The president’s allies speak of a Secretary General driven by ambition and bent on establishing a personal base inside the party that is reminiscent of a fiefdom wholly accountable to himself and himself alone.
Observers say the rift has become so deep that any efforts at reconciling the two men might be a waste of time.
The personalities in the sub-committee are unlikely to be gun shy in defence of the president. It is game and everything goes. The Secretary General can at the very least see himself as a legitimate target.
But the Committee arrive to see their plate already full.
The Stevie Harvey tender is a case in point.
Tautona Lodge purchase has been a public sham.
And the Okavango land has been an unforced embarrassment on the part of government.
All these have been badly handled at latest on the public relations front.
An opportunity still exists to address them coolly.
Outbursts will not make public suspicions go away. If anything they get entrenched.
It might well be that government never intended to do anything underhand.
But the suspicions highlight a lack of public trust that has come to characterise this government
Masisi supporters are itching for something big to celebrate.
Like all of us they are abnormally conscious of how Covid 19 response has been badly mismanaged by government – starting with the food parcels during the lockdown into procurement corruption of all the consumable and culminating with a vaccine rollout which has been nothing short of a fiasco.
A big chance has been missed to turn Covid 19 into an opportunity.
The temptation is to brush over it, put a spin to it and make it look like it has been a success.
It would be fascinating to see how the recently selected communications sub-committee led by Banks Kentse, a staunch Masisi ally will do that.
