Almost without exception, Mokgweetsi Masisi’s cabinet appointments have been hailed as a breath of fresh air. It is a bit of an embellishment.
The truth is that in a broad way he was only moving and shifting old furniture around.
He did not have much room to maneuver. And since he could only appoint from Members of Parliament already in place, he arrived to find that he has already been dealt his cards.
He had to appoint ministers from exactly the same pool that was left by his predecessor.
Based on the appointments, it is thus for now totally impossible to honestly and accurately judge just what Masisi intends the tenor and texture of his Government to be.
By and large we have to wait for the outcome of the General Elections due next year to make a proper assessment of the man ÔÇô assuming of course that he wins.
But there is one area where Masisi does not have to wait for next year’s General Elections for him to assert himself.
Both the Government and State House have been blighted by a decade of partisan, corrosive, acidic and often divisive politics, founded on corruption, favouritism and un-evenhandedness.
Because it was perceived to work for some and not others, the institution of the presidency has also been diminished in the eyes of the public.
For much of the last ten years, the middle class was ruthlessly excluded from mainstream public discourse.
Inside the public service promotions and appointments were made based not on merit but loyalty and even open cronyism.
In the mainstream, pluralism and diversity of views suffered worst crisis during those years.
Those holding different opinions were often singled out for humiliation and even isolation.
Business people were literally hunted down to establish if they held anything viewed as sympathetic to opposition.
Those so judged to hold divergent views were closed down or hounded out of the country.
The end result was that out of fear, people recoiled into their little shells and cocoons.
This has promoted darkness and encouraged mediocrity.
President Masisi was right in his inaugural speech to say he will concentrate on getting rid of widespread poverty and unemployment.
These are the twin evils that have blighted the country’s otherwise strong developmental fundamentals.
But they are not the only ones.
Inequality too remains a blot.
Masisi has promised to put the economy back on the rails. That too is creditable.
A strong economy is always a good thing. But no matter how strong the economy, it will not matter much if it continues to exclude a majority of the people.
Ian Khama’s ten years in office were characterized by a stagnant economy ÔÇô admittedly much of it not of his making.
But it is on his nurturing of corruption that Khama’s tenure will for years to come be remembered.
Not much else will change unless Masisi personally and decisively fights corruption, including at the highest echelons of Government.
Under Ian Khama corruption blossomed and got so rooted that in the end it soiled the presidency and contaminated the air.
The president did not seem to care, especially because for a greater part members of his favoured inner circle were at the centre of it all.
A gilded royal that he is, to everybody’s surprise Khama despised the media, detested the middle class and was immensely disdainful of the academia.
Somebody who has been around Khama for much of his presidency says that it was an endless source of immense pain for him that the media and the middle class (especially the media) never bothered to give him credit for anything.
The end result was that he stayed away.
“By his view the media sought to lead a campaign to delegitimize him. And as a consequence he chose to go directly to the people. It is not something that came naturally to him.”
It would be foolhardy to dismiss Khama’s views of the media out of hand.
But having so forcefully and in the end successfully sidelined the media, he should also have administered the same medicine to those closest to him deemed to be corrupt.
He did not.
Because the president seemed to have a soft spot for many corrupt people within his circle, in the end an impression was created that he too was a beneficiary of the corrupt acts.
In the end hope was lost that anything good could come out from his Government.
Masisi does not enjoy the kind of goodwill that Khama had when he came in. But what little goodwill he has is nonetheless sufficient to help him carry the nation behind him.
In the broader scheme of things, that is all that matters.
As we found out to our deepest pain as a nation, too much goodwill is not always a good thing.
It can lead to arrogance, impunity, rent-seeking and even brashness.
Too much goodwill led Khama to triumphalism and allowed him to literally run roughshod over institutions.
Throughout his presidency he painted his world in stark black and white colours ÔÇôleaving no room for any shades in between.
To use George W. Bush’s phrase you were either with him or against him.
He always saw himself as a victim, thus entrenching a siege mentality.
This led him to pursue a scotched earth policy.
He did not like to share power. And winner-takes-all was from the beginning to the end, his favoured emblem.
The end result was that he personalized the Office of the President and drove the country down an abyss of imperial presidency.
Taking their cue from him, those around him became little gods, fully aware that they were untouchable as they were fully covered by an iron shield.
It was their turn at the high table. And anybody who stood on their way was mocked, shamed and dismissed as a disgruntled outsider.
The cult-like membership of his inner circle and its exclusivity put paid to the long held view that the presidency was a sacrosanct national institution that like the national flag was there to unite the nation.
Because there was no room for magnanimity, this led to the degeneration of the institutions and with that a near irreversible erosion of the moral authority of the presidency.
As he sets out to deliver on his pronounced priorities that include youth employment, Masisi has another mammoth task of ounce again restoring the moral authority of his office so that once again that office can become an inclusive national institution ÔÇô inspiring and uniting everybody, including those who differ with him politically and otherwise.
