The proxy diplomatic war that President Ian Khama waged against Robert Mugabe starting April 2008 has now been comprehensively lost.
As it turns out, the gun boat diplomacy was not only deceptive but ill-advised and shortsighted as well.
May be Khama needed a bigger target like Mugabe with which to launch his arrival as pesident of Botswana, but the bravado is unravelling on the economic realities we now have to face as a country.
Botswana wants to build a railway line and an oil pipeline to reach the coast of Mozambique, and there is no reaching there without going through Mugabe’s territory.
Getting Mugabe to agree to such demands coming from Botswana would be the hardest thing next to asking him to leave state power.
There should be little sympathy for Botswana. The isolation in which we find ourselves is wholly self-inflicted. There may be those who will accuse me of lacking patrotism. I care very little.
As we made our bed, so we must sleep on it.
In Robert Mugabe, Ian Khama has met his macth. The Zimbabwean strongman is as tenacious as he is patient. While Khama wants to create Botswana in his image, Mugabe has for the last thirty years been working on creating Southern africa in his own, and with a great degree of success at it.
From Zambia to South Africa, from Angola to Mozambique, from Namibia to the DRC, Mugabe has nurtured and sustained a strong alliance of former liberation fighters, many of whom literally look up to him as a political godfather who has stood up for them when the chips were down.
Mugabe is a man who, for the last thirty years and more, has had all of Southerrn Africa as his exclusive hunting ground. And he is not about to let go of, notwithstanding old age, poor health and isolation on account of European sponsored sanctions .
There is no doubt that Mugabe behaved terribly before and after losing the 2008 elections in Zimbabwe, but Botswana’s behaviour in openly backing Morgan Tsvangirai was totally unhelpful and counterproductive.
It’s time to pay a price for backing a wrong horse, so to speak.
It is astonishing that now, because Mugabe holds the key to cross border rail and pipelines that Botswana’s ruling elite needs badly, President Khama behaves as though he and Mugabe have always been buddies, that he had always wanted to help Mugabe out if only the Zimbabwean could understand it, that it was the West afterall that was to blame for all Botswana’s past bad attitude towards Zimbabwe. That unfortunately will not stick.
We must never forgert that the Mugabe we are today eager to appease is the same man who President Ian Khama, arriving from a Summit in Lusaka briefed the western diplomats in Gaborone as having spent most of the entire meeting sleeping with one eye open ÔÇô an art, Khama continued to the glee of his listerners, Mugabe must have perfected over the years.
That was most unpleasant indeed, especially coming from a man whose father the Zimbabwean had worked with closely during the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe. And there is no question that Mugabe has been quetly brooding over this insult.
Our foreign policy on Zimbabwe was wrong from the beginning. And its failure was inevitable. We behaved as though we had power over our geography.
Eager to please America and Europe, we behaved as though Botswana did not share a thousand kilometre long border with Zimbabwe. Once again, there is no denying that Mugabe has done terrible things to his people, but under Khama, Botswana government has behaved as though we would wake up one morning to see ourselves no longer a neighbour to a country led by an old man we did not like. That has not happened. And we have to face the consequences of our past behaviour.
After throwing all the tantrums at him, Mugabe is still around, still calls the shots in Zimbabwe and we have to deal with him and nobody else.
Ashamed and no doubt desperate all our president can do is send emmissaries, including army generals, with caps in hand to make statements heavily laden with conciliatory and political undertones that are meant to placate, pander and appease Robert Mugabe. It will not wash.
Mugabe will have none of it until Khama himself, the chief culprit, comes to Harare to apologise in person and in public for that matter, the same way that upon defeat, the Khama offenders here are often humiliated and forced to grovel.
An experienced political player, Mugabe knows that he now has that which Khama needs deperately; the servitude authority over a territory on which Khama and his friends want to build a rail and pipeline that will run accross Zimbabwe. If the servitude is ultimately given, the price for getting it will be excessively high.
The process towards building the two pieces of infrastricture is going to be so tedious, so hard and demeaning that along the way some of our people will start asking if the efforts are really worth the prize. That is how Mugabe operates. He is patient and ruthless at the same time.
The situation is made all the worse by the fact that he does not need Botswana, does not need Khama, never did and will probably never do.
If permission is ultimately given to build rail and pipelines across Zimbabwe, it will be Mugabe’s not Khama’s doing. Such permission will come with high and by all accounts demeaning conditions, most likely including an undertaking never to speak ill of Zimbabwe in general and its Mugabe in particular at any of the future SADC meetings. To put the cherry on top, we can expect a grovelling public apology ÔÇô from one president of a republic to another.
This is yet another title that Mugabe has under his belt.
