This week’s cabinet reshuffle has sent shockwaves throughout the country’s entire landscape. Nobody knows what to make of it all. The business and the public service bureaucracies are for once united on one thing ÔÇô confusion. For all the uncertainty, two things are however beyond doubt. The first one is that President Ian Khama has once again confirmed his commitment to remaining as the sole arbiter of largesse, able to give it and hold it back with ever increasing levels of vacillation, whim and caprice. By all measure what has happened to Mokgweetsi Masisi and Shaw Kgathi amounts to a demotion. We can expect this unpredictability on the part of Khama to increase as his days of a lame duck presidency earnestly set in especially after the elections, once the succession question is resolved.
During that time which by definition is the period when the public starts to discount the departing emperor and all attention shifts towards the incoming one, there is often irresistible temptation for irrational show of strength by incumbent if only to demonstrate their relevance and prove that contrary to all public perceptions they still call the shots. The second thing to come out very clearly out of this so-called cabinet reshuffle is Pelonomi Venson’s continued sway over President Khama. Since the departure of Daniel Kwelagobe, Venson remains perhaps the only cabinet minister who is able to hold her own against President Khama, including telling him unvarnished truths, however uncomfortable. The scandal of ambiguity, irrationality and indecision surrounding the reshuffle is all a result of Venson’s unrivalled ability to negotiate, extract and carve deals for herself from the President.
Again and again, events have proved that President Khama has a soft spot for Venson. This of course is despite occasional differences between the two as when the President famously confided to a friend that Venson was too clever for his liking, or as when Khama clandestinely backed Venson’s rival for BDP chairmanship last year. After the education fiasco and on the backdrop of growing uneasiness within the ruling party that disaster was coming their way unless something was done, President Khama needed a scalp to prove that he was still in charge. If it were anybody else other than Venson, they would have been given clear marching orders to assuage public clamour for a scapegoat. But Pelonomi Venson is not an ordinary minister. To President Khama she is both a loyalist and family retainer on whom the President can count when the chips are down. More crucially, she is a touchstone of the president’s informal but elaborate structures that work above and independent of both party and government. For months now many in government have been expecting her to be sacked from cabinet.
But, Venson, as one permanent secretary said to me this week, is a survivor, obviously invoking memories of her stellar political comeback after she was mercilessly sacked by then President Sir Ketumile Masire following the Christie Commission. Still all the above do not in any way explain, much less justify what has been a terrible and embarrassing indecision on the part of President Khama. Contrary to popular view the real losers of the reshuffle are Mokgweetsi Masisi and of course Shaw Kgathi. Forget the legal references which are invoked to justify what everybody knows that a president can do what he wants with his cabinet. It would be a reckless lie to say an acting appointment, which is what Masisi and Kgathi now are and a substantive one, which is what they were until this week, can ever be equal.
A week ago these two men were senior ministers holding substantive positions in Government. They have now been reduced to acting ministers inside a cabinet whose existence at best can be said to precarious. As it is the reshuffle has now cushioned Venson from the daily stresses and indignities that come with being a minister of education in Botswana; a position from which the current Vice President, PHK Kedikilwe once resigned saying he was not up to it. Venson will now have the luxury of time to do other things including entrenching herself on party side of things. We cannot say with any certainty that this was Khama’s intention, but if the two’s relational history is anything to go by then there is a reason to assume Venson is being prepared for bigger things to come. For a man famous for decisiveness, courage and will power such a glaring failure to send a clear message of what his intensions are, signals possible existence of inner feels that the President does not think he is as strong as the public believes. And this will come at a cost. However way one looks at it, this amounts to a moral defeat.
Khama’s paternalistic authority which often borders on autocracy has turned to embitter many of his followers, frustrate even his most ardent admirers and expose the sheer helplessness of his critics including those within the party when forced to face and deal with the might of his overreaching individual power. That is set to change. Where before people looked up to him for moral authority, a growing number is now prepared, in-fact all too happy to look down upon him. The confusion he has caused with an ambiguous and indecisive cabinet reshuffle has become an anti-climax to the moral prestige with which he boisterously marched into office in April 2008. Already buoyed by despondency within the ruling party circles, this indecision by the president can only lend new impetus to opposition parties that were already on a march.
There is some confidence within them that there are spoils ripe for the taking. With so little time left for him, it’s growing increasingly difficult to see how causing such chaos could be reversed well in time as to bequeath some moral legitimacy on his legacy going forward. Enoch Powell, a celebrated British politician could not have gotten it any more correct when all political lives, unless cut off midstream at happy juncture end up in failure.
