Botswana now has at least two centers of power.
Former president SKI Khama has identified a void that he is moving with astonishing speed and conviction – first to exploit and then to fill.
In doing so he is creating confusion and irreparable reputational damage for Botswana government – at home and abroad.
There is irrefutable proof that SKI Khama has become a massive political problem for the current government. And they are struggling in vain to contain him.
In quite a bizarre way, SKI Khama is literally running roughshod over this government and along the way undermining the ability of incumbent president, Mokgweetsi Masisi to run the country and take full control of government.
An announcement early in the week that Khama had procured vaccines on behalf of Botswana after a failure to do so by Masisi government is a huge statement that should be taken seriously because it signals the beginning of more serious troubles for the Masisi government.
To say the relationship between Masisi and Khama is fraught is an irresponsible understatement.
It is toxic. And should be considered a national security matter.
In fact since the day he left office, Ian Khama has been an unremitting distraction for Masisi.
Events have long moved beyond the original causes for the fallout.
The situation is so bad that to a growing number of people it seems like Masisi is only in office but not in power.
Khama has penetrated government to the highest levels. He does not attend cabinet meetings. But he is as informed about those meetings the same way he was when he used to chair them.
The whole thing is so bad that for Masisi and his ministers, it has now morphed into a psychodrama.
There is not a week that passes without Khama or his associates forcing this government to dance on hot coal – one way or another.
In the beginning Batswana were mere spectators of the soap opera. They have now become active participants.
Of course the situation is made all the worse by the fact that the government is itself not playing at the top of its game.
They are constantly on a backfoot, ham-fisted and making too many unforced blunders.
And this frustrates too many people who are willing to give them a chance, who fed-up with status quo end up not only lionizing Khama but also feeling a sense of nostalgia about him.
All of a sudden there are people in our mist who miss the golden age; “the good old days” when Khama was president.
That is naïve beyond the pale. In office, Khama eschewed accountability.
We should never forget that before he left office, Khama had been president and vice president for a total of twenty years. That is if we include the months when he threw tantrums and chose to leave office and go on what he and his friends called sabbatical leave.
The past three weeks have probably been the worst for Masisi since coming to power in 2018.
During those three weeks a few factors connived to fatally undermine the future electoral viability of the president in particular but also his party in general.
Too many things went wrong for Masisi and his government.
And it is now clear that something has truly shifted.
If in 2024 he loses power, Masisi should look back at the winter of 2021 as the season when everything started to truly unravel.
Top of those factors has been Covid 19.
Since the pandemic started almost two years ago, the last few weeks have been the worst for Botswana.
Deaths and hospitalizations literally put the nation and country on the brink.
And owing to an above average cold winter, a deadly variant and a terribly poor vaccine roll-out programme, Botswana found itself holding the unenviable tittle of the worst affected country in the world.
The last few weeks shook the nation’s faith to the root. There is no how the president would not have realized just how traumatised and angry the nation had become during that time.
For the first time Masisi has looked truly helpless and often lost.
A poll if any could be produced locally, would certainly cast doubt on the president’s electoral viability were elections to be held today.
Just as the Covid coals were catching the heat an opinion of the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions effectively made the situation harder for Masisi government when it agreed with Khama that there had been attempts on his life.
Khama had reported Botswana government to the office of Special Rapporteur Geneva.
In the end he received what looked like a default judgement.
Botswana had bungled the matter by staying close to three months without replying to the communication from the UN Special Rapporteur.
For a government with an internationalist posture this looked truly negligent if not outright malignant.
As if that was not bad enough, there followed the Director of Public Prosecutions effectively dropping criminal charges against an intelligence operative codenamed Butterfly.””
In this P100 billion case, Butterfly was effectively a side show. Her case was supposed to be a precursor to a big one.
Ian Khama was the ultimate trophy that everybody was waiting and looking forward to seeing him charged.
The Butterfly case was a crown jewel in multi-pronged efforts to nail down Khama.
Without Butterfly its hard to see how any charges against Khama himself can be sustained.
For government, by now it was no longer raining but pouring.
Then the High Court ruled that Botswana Government had broken the law by denying Khama access to aircraft.
Botswana Government has been ordered to repay Khama the full amount of a charter plane he flew to India when he visited the Dalai Lama. That includes security detail that he had hired.
In short, Botswana government was found to have broken the law.
This is a big deal for a government whose founding tenet was the rule of law.
It was not over yet.
Then this week Khama dropped a nuclear bomb.
He had negotiated and secured possible procurement for the Pfizer Vaccine, he said.
Up to that point it all sounded innocuous.
All Botswana government needed do was to pay.
But it was not that simple. Vaccine procurement have remained an exclusive domain of government.
That much Khama knew, but it did not bother him.
He knew exactly what he was up to.
He is taking advantage of the difficulties that President Mokgweetsi Masisi finds himself in, especially in the fight against Covid-19. Government is still struggling to secure vaccine.
This is an exceedingly difficult and indeed precarious moment for the president.
He finds himself in a ditch.
His personal popularity is at its lowest. His bigger and more immediate goal will be winning public trust, so that once again the nation can take him at his words.
That will not be an easy task.
And Khama is fully aware of it. And he is exploiting that to the fullest.
There is a void that Khama is filling. He behaves like he is running a parallel government, which in a way he is.
The test now is on Masisi’s resilience.
Just what does he do to recover? Dynamics have changed and so should the Masisi behaviour.
He cannot afford to behave the same way he did when people were fed up with Ian Khama in 2019.
In the eyes of many people, Khama has been able to redeem and reinvent himself.
Right now there is a groundswell of public nostalgia for him.
If you ask me I would say it’s silly, but it’s there. It is fueled by government incompetence on important subjects, including Covid.
Khama strategy is to cast Masisi as clueless and his government as dysfunctional.
He has effectively launched his campaign for 2024. And it might just be the best financed campaign yet.
The futility of government’s obsession with Khama is now in full public glare. That obsession is coming back to haunt them.
President Masisi has a big job of running country and Government.
He has to do so while also trying to redeem himself in the eyes of the public that is growing increasingly hostile and contemptuous of him.
And Khama, having created a centre of power for himself will not be making it any easy for Masisi.
