I am no great fan of the man but there is no running away from the extent to which President Ian Khama has single-handedly reinvented the ruling Botswana Democratic Party to a level where the party is no longer able to talk of a future without him.
For a party that only a few years ago was said to be on terminal decline, Ian Khama has restored BDP’s interest in life and has, overnight, become its embodiment for longevity.
But for all the good he has done for the BDP, it has not been without a price.
Ian Khama and democracy are not synonymous.
To bring life back into the party, the president has had to break as many sacred rules as has been humanly possible.
Although he would not want to admit it, he represents a total and comprehensive break from all that his predecessors stood for.
I doubt even his illustrious father captured and captivated the nation’s imagination the way the son is doing.
In fact, none of his predecessors could be singled out as coming anywhere close to being Ian Khama’s spiritual patron.
While all his predecessors believed in the politics of consensus, especially at party level, from early on Ian Khama sought to carve a solo, hegemonic role for himself.
Unlike Seretse Khama who we learn had a way of making the lesser people around him feel important even as he was head and shoulders above everyone else in popularity, charisma and public appeal, Ian Khama has for his part gleefully presided over the humiliating departure of many a former BDP heavyweight; all as a result of his unrelenting demand that power, and with it public attention, should not be shared.
We read from Ketumile Masire’s memoirs that Moutlakgola Ngwako and David Magang were the two men who from early on made it a point to challenge Masire’s rise to power following Seretse’s death in 1980.
But for the entire duration of his presidency, Masire made it a point to retain both Ngwako and Magang in his cabinet. The same cannot be said about Ian Khama who likes to compare disagreement with disloyalty.
This is a president who has not hesitated to banish into political wilderness anybody who has dared to challenge him or cross his path, however faintly.
Ian Khama’s cabinet room has not much space for those who have the knack to question the big man’s commitment to the politics of inclusion.
During Festus Mogae’s reign at the top, an exuberant young politician from Palapye called Boyce Sebetlela had made it his pastime to engage the president over anything and everything. Mogae made no attempt to silence or sideline Sebetlela. The President engaged the yuppie and won all the debates.
It was only on the eve of Ian Khama’s arrival that the visibly scared Sebetlela literally ran away from politics, obviously realizing that the incoming regime was not going to have either the heart or patience for his intellectual antics.
In every sense, Ian Khama has torn the rule book apart.
He has managed to get away with it because he has systematically, and successfully, one might add, managed to purge any potential voices of dissent.
Unlike his predecessors, Ian Khama never makes any effort to reach out; not to the media, not to opposition in parliament and certainly not to those with different views inside his own party.
Outside his small, tight and loyal circle of friends, either from his days in the army or from the country’s white community, Ian Khama does not meet anybody else to talk about any issue of substance.
Skeptics still insist that a recent meeting with the Leader of Opposition was more show than substance.
Unlike all his predecessors, he looks at the BDP not as a vehicle of power, but rather as a nuisance that has up to now distracted and painfully obstructed and slowed his schedule to carry the country on the path he had set for himself.
He looks at the BDP as not only divisive but also a dangerous throwback from history that chronically lacks principle.
Inevitably, every once in a while he turns to it if only to assess if somehow it can help speed his strategic intent, never because he believes in its broader ideals, not least because he has long dismissed it as both bogus and disingenuous.
He patently and resolutely does not trust the overlords who have dominated, controlled and ruled the BDP for the last few decades.
Yet still for a man who despises it so deeply it’s altogether surprising the extent to which Ian Khama walks heavily on the BDP.
The party cannot imagine a life without him.
For a man who resents it so much, he is easily the most worshipped politician in BDP’s fifty year history.
I often hang my head in shame at the party’s apparent helplessness without him.
No wonder many inside the BDP talk about him as if he is the beginning and the end.
They talk about him as if life started when he joined politics and will, God forbid, come to an end the day he leaves politics.
That is dangerous.
Relying so heavily on just one person can never be right, however great the individual.
Conscious of his supposed indispensability, Ian Khama has swiftly moved on to browbeat everybody into line, including (one is still to understand for how long) the once defiant and boisterous Daniel Kwelagobe.
Even for those of us who have never pretended to be his admirers, we grudgingly accept the sordid fact that we are living in a Khama era.
The Khama era is by every account different from all that we have known before it.
There was no such feeling during days of Sir Ketumile, a self-made politician who amazed the world by his enduring pragmatism, diplomatic skill and unwavering consensual demeanour.
That also is no less true of the tenure of Festus Mogae, a born liberal who cared little about what anybody thought of him as long as his liberal ideals were enhanced.
Khama’s indomitable status inside the BDP will in the long term do the party more harm than good.
A psyche is being created that nobody else but him is capable of running the party let alone the country.
Nobody in the BDP wants to imagine a life without Ian Khama.
So immersed is the party in this myth that no attempt, however remotely is even being entertained to prepare for the day when Ian Khama will no longer be there.
It’s high time the country deals with the cult culture that Ian Khama’s name inspires among his followers.
While they behave like he will never depart the political scene, my calculation tells me he should be gone in six years, the last two of which he will, as nature dictates, spend as a lame duck president, discounted by everyone including those who today never cease to smile at him, endlessly telling him what a wonder he is; a great gift from God, sent to both the party and country.
Never before in the history of a political party has so much relied on the shoulders of just one individual.
This to me is a very risky lifestyle, especially for a party that says it wants to rule forever.
The BDP will one day pay a heavy price for failing to internalize the fact that important as he is, even Ian Khama will one day leave the stage.
Individuals come and go, as will one day be the case with Ian Khama.
Each passing year convinces me more strongly that the BDP will disintegrate the day Khama leaves office.
What a sad legacy to live behind! But still a fitting one for someone whose political habits and lifestyle promoted isolation and cronyism.
