By any measure that matters, Ndelu Seretse’s hasty reinstatement is a political solution to what is by all accounts a legal problem.
A day before he was acquitted by the magistrate, I had a chat with Seretse.
He struck me as a deeply spiritual man who had unfortunately lost his way into the cluttered maze of politics.
He thinks long and hard before he answers any question.
He goes full lengths to avoid mentioning anyone by name.
And his answers are not short of philosophical doses.
I had a feeling that even though he is quick to depict himself as a victim, deep inside he has bouts and bouts of strengths.
To him it is the institutions and functions of those institutions that matter.
After his acquittal, I also met him outside the court. There was no change of attitude.
All that seemed to matter to him was that he had just cleared his name.
For him the twelve months of trauma had come to a glorious end.
If he knew that he would be back into cabinet less than a day after he was acquitted, then he did not show it.
As far as it mattered to him, cabinet appointments were made elsewhere by somebody else and not himself.
A cabinet appointment, at least at the time, was of no concern to him. He did not ask for it; he surely was not looking forward to one.
But reappointed to cabinet, he was.
And as was to be expected, his reappointment became a national event.
It caused more controversy than the criminal court case from which he had just emerged.
The whole nation cannot come to grips with how it has been that for close to a year, a ministerial position was literally reserved for a man who, for that duration, was battling to clear his name at the courts.
We whined, howled and wailed for all we could, but in the end it was an exercise in futility. To President Khama, not only is Seretse indispensable, he also knows where the bodies are buried.
For the first time, we hear that even the loyalist band of BDP mascots that always unthinkingly pledge their support to the President are this time around skeptical that the big man’s decision was perhaps too big, too soon.
But then such is the importance of Seretse to Ian Khama.
The nation should reflect on Seretse’s reappointment as a true measure of what is to become of their nation in the long term.
We may not like it, not least because he is a close relative of the President, but if there ever were any doubts about it, they should now be laid to rest; Seretse is truly an integral component of President Khama’s succession plans. To the president, so much revolves around having him around, including, perhaps most crucially, what will become of Khama’s long term legacy.
After the court case, followed by a hasty reappointment into cabinet, it’s hard to identify any one person who means more to the president than Seretse.
Without him, Khama’s world simply stops moving. It looks like it had stopped for close to twelve months, until this week when a magistrate declared him free to walk.
For many of us commentators, the court case has been a blessing in disguise.
It has saved us the agony of second guessing who our next Head of State is going to be.
It has been an exercise in elimination.
It is now cast in stone ÔÇô almost.
There is no questioning the legality of a decision to appoint Seretse back into cabinet.
Rather what comes into question is the president’s judgment.
Is his indebtedness to Seretse so big that all sense of decency, all sense of shame and all proportion of humility had to be set aside at the slightest opportunity to readmit Seretse back into cabinet?
This is not an opportunity to deride Seretse, still less an opportunity to hit at the president’s clear inner feelings of vulnerability when Seretse treaded between jail and a future life in the State House.
But it helps no one when political solutions are induced to resolve legal difficulties and the law is used to resolve problems that are inherently political.
Yet that is the abyss into what we find ourselves sliding as a result of Seretse’s acquittal earlier this week.
It is a dilemma which the president must come to terms with.
Just because a decision is not illegal does not in any way imply it is necessarily a right decision.
Appointing Seretse back into cabinet a few hours after he was cleared may have been wholly legal, just as was a related decision to reserve him a position in cabinet even as he battled his troubles with the law.
But do such decisions do anything to advance our values as a people?
