On a trip to Cuba a few months ago, a reporter asked the Minister of Education, Pelonomi Venson, if she did not read her appointment to that ministry as a furtive ploy by President Ian Khama to cut her political career short.
The reporter had reminded Venson that the ministry is a burying ground riddled with skulls of failed political careers. She could become the latest victim, said the reporter.
So upset and embarrassed was the Government delegation that the journalist was immediately sent packing back home.
By any measure a very experienced man, the said reporter has told me how shocked he was that Venson, of all the people, could have been annoyed by such a question.
Strong recommendations were made for action against the journalist, who was in turn suspended from work pending investigations.
We shall probably never know for sure why Venson took offence to what appears to me to have been an innocuous line of questioning, the kind of which she – a former journalist – has dealt with her entire life.
Venson is a seasoned politician, who in her long career, especially as a civil servant, has been through many tumultuous situations.
But she has always been able to bounce back.
As permanent secretary, she was sacked after she was accused of having misused her position and influence as Board Chairperson of the Botswana Housing Corporation.
But she emerged from the personal misfortune much stronger and more powerful to become a minister of state.
At her constituency in Serowe, she has emerged from past losses to become the almost unassailable Member of Parliament that she is today.
Her shrewd and steel hard demeanour, coupled with a knack for survival, is the priceless attributes she has invariably relied on and ruthlessly employed during her many low moments.
But truth be told, sincerity and public spiritedness are not among Venson’s most outstanding strengths.
Rather, she comes across as a shrewd, cold and calculating strategist cum risk taker who deliberately and knowingly sets herself unusually high targets the achievement of which she does not brook dissent along her path.
Her dealings with the private media during her time as minister responsible for information revealed the lengths she was prepared to go in her tenacity to bend facts in her quest to endear herself to her political master and to win public sympathy while also assailing as to literally crush the opposite side.
She is a brilliant politician, with a mathematician’s mind.
She has a sharp intellect with a fondness for detail that is rare among our politicians.
Her grasp for public policy is unrivalled and for that it is never easy for aides to go behind her back as is so often the case with other ministers.
But more crucially, she seems to have crafted and internalized the true value of understanding and playing to other people’s fears, anxieties and weaknesses, not least those of her political masters.
Her most revealing moment was her recent strategy to save the BDP, which was bought hook, line and sinker by President Ian Khama.
It was a high stakes, high risk strategy fraught and laced with all the niceties that effectively concealed not only its inherent dangers but also its true intentions.
Forget the fact that the strategy put her political career on the line as one of the conditions for getting the presidential nod.
True to her character, she closed her eyes to the risks and allowed herself to be goaded by the high rewards the strategy promised in the event of a victory.
And for her, it almost delivered miracles were it not for the cold blooded envy she attracted and ignited from cabinet rivals who interpreted her actions as putting herself through the paces to become Vice President.
The strategy was a Venson classic ÔÇô bold, daring, shrewd, tactical, cold, far and clear-sighted and, as always, self-serving.
Fresh from the aborted BDP saving strategy, Venson has been seized with yet another career threatening crisis.
It is a little drama that may prove the ominous predictions by the journalist self-fulfilling.
Botswana is going through what threatens to be the worst crisis our education system has had to go through. Sensing blood like vultures, the opposition has started hovering low.
I worry that even our most consummate tactician may find herself overwhelmed.
What initially started as a small industrial dispute by teachers over fees for invigilating school examinations is fast mutating into a political dispute.
At the centre of it all is Pelonomi Venson – the charismatic, resilient and ever shrewd strategist.
To be fair to her, this time around she is not the one who started the fires.
Rather she arrived at the Ministry of Education to find the raging inferno already in full swing ÔÇô uncontrollably one might add.
So bad was the situation that when she arrived teachers and the Examination Council had long stopped talking to each other.
Her mistake, however, was to treat the teachers with the same attitude she had treated the private media from her previous bouts ÔÇô like little kids.
That has backfired badly. She now finds herself accused of crimes she so manifestly never committed.
For the first time I find myself sympathizing with a politician, a scheming one for that matter!
Is it for her the beginning of the end, as a journalist colleague and friend once predicted while on a visit to Cuba?
But we have to put things into perspective.
While there is no doubting Venson’s personal shortcomings, the teachers have been grossly insincere and disingenuous.
Having obtained a High Court judgment that it is not their responsibility to invigilate examinations, they should bugger off and stop making Venson’s efforts to run examinations without them not only a living hell but also an impossibility.
We respect teachers’ decisions to withdraw their labour in line with the court judgment but they should not interfere, meddle and stand on the minister’s little strategies to fill the vacuum.
