Saturday, November 2, 2024

The media will one day step up to defend Masisi and Magosi against state abuse when the duo is out of power

There is now all likelihood under the sun that the next president of Botswana who succeeds Mokgweetsi Masisi will want to take the cue from the current and institute an array of investigations and legal injunctions against Masisi.

At least on this point it really does not matter who succeeds Masisi. Even Slumber Tsogwane, the ever loyal Masisi deputy, who many people wrongly accuse of weakness and adequacy will if he becomes a president have no shortage of reasons to go after Masisi if only to prove that he is his own man.

Precedence has been sufficiently established. All probability is also that when that happens, Masisi’s intelligence chief, Peter Magosi will also be dragged into the fray.

Out of power, the two men will have no access to state infrastructure to protect them. That is exactly the place where former president Ian Khama and his intelligence chief Isaac Kgosi find themselves today.

Khama and Kgosi had thought they had their ducks in a row. Little did they know that the man they had supported as successor against competitors and made his ascendance to power a shoo-in had other plans.

For a while Kgosi was actually Masisi’s intelligence chief, just as Khama had pontificated,  until one morning Kgosi arrived at the Office of the President, only to receive a letter summarily sacking him, and also got marched out of office at gunpoint by his erstwhile junior officers. That really was the beginning of the fall from power for Khama and Kgosi. And the beginning of all troubles.

That was in mid-2018.Since then Kgosi, especially has never really been far from jail in whatever format one looks at it. In fact since 2018, Botswana government offer no exemplary  vintage point – neither on conflict resolution among leaders or on successor/predecessor relations. The whole thing reached its peak last month. And a good number of my close friends have been at pains to make sense of all was playing out in public, especially asking me to explain why the media seemed to be on the side of Khama and Kgosi against the state.

This is given the history where the media was routinely persecuted during the administration of Khama. And my friends are pleasant people who have tried to stay above the catfight that has become the Masisi and Khama relations.

Kgosi was the foot soldier in chief who implemented Khama’s ideology against the media.The feeling among my friends is that this is the opportunity time for the media to help finish off Khama. Yet the media has to many people’s surprise joined the Khama bandwagon. In fact it has not.It is also not the job of the media to finish off Khama and Kgosi.All that the media has done has been to call for Khama and Kgosi to get their day in court.

And that if they have to face the music so be it. All the media is calling for is a fair process against Khama and Kgosi that can withstand public scrutiny. All that is media has done has been to caution against abuse of state institutions. In doing so, the media is indirectly showing Khama and Kgosi that there was never anything personal against the duo when they were in power and were doing everything to bend processes to their side.


And that their differences with the media, which Khama often mistakenly attributed to an “unpatriotic” media were actually a result of his contempt for accountability. There was a time when Khama and Kgosi were so powerful that they fancied themselves untouchable.

Jail, prosecution and persecution were words that could not be spoken in the same line with their names. There is no doubt that those in power today thinks the same about themselves. Power often has a strange way of removing people, even those from poverty-stricken backgrounds from reality.

People who attain power that is beyond their wildest dreams often turn their backs on the people they have always associated with. That is simply so because such people often fail to grasp the innate value of power itself, much less its strategic value. Their understanding of it is limited to abstract terms – power for the sake of power, like using it to attain personal wealth while doing nothing to uplift or unite the nation.

But power also has a strange way of ending and being replaced by absolute despair and  powerlessness. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Ghaddafi are a just a few examples. At the height of their power, it was unthinkable that either of them would one day be found or be killed in a ditch.

The same people who are today cheering Masisi and Magosi on to arrest Khama and Kgosi with no due process will one day be doing the same against the new state when both Masisi and Magosi are out of power and are on the receiving end.The media will stay constant. The media will raise the hand in defence of due process for both Masisi and Magosi. Those are the ethos that are a part of a founding dictum for the media.

Its next to impossible to pin down the media to prevailing biases and prejudices. The media often finds itself almost instinctively on the side of the weak and the underdog. Never kick a man when he is down, is a motto that journalists often embrace almost sub-consciously. Even out of power, Khama has a very strong social infrastructure that is easily the envy of many.

That has to do with the fact that he is to his people a traditional leader. This, sadly is a position that Khama has ben too eager to manipulate or even abuse.I doubt an out of power Masisi would even have half of the social infrastructure that Khama enjoys today. After what he did to the media, Khama will himself be surprised at the fairness of the media towards himself.

It is not that the media has forgotten. Or that they now love him. To the contrary it is part of a belief that there was never anything personal. And that the same teachings of accountability he so aggressively spurned will now be held against his political successor.

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