There is no question that president Mokgweetsi Masisi is fast losing his moral authority. His power is kept intact by a few factors chief of which is that he remains the dispenser of patronage. A weak and dysfunctional opposition with some of its key members clamouring to get tenders and contracts from his government is another factor. An important yet little mentioned factor is that he is surrounded by ministers that desperately need his patronage.
A good number of them don’t deserve to be in cabinet at any time. They are a classic example of how far down the standards have dropped. And the president would be the first to acknowledge it. That is not all. Much more than Ian Khama, albeit in a different way President Masisi uses the intelligence services to instill fear and tyranny among citizens.
Exactly how Masisi survives the moral test he is facing is difficult to say. Not least because to a growing number of people, he is no longer his own man. A case study has to be recent events at the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime. The president hired Tymon Katlholo mistakenly believing he could somehow use his surrogates to control and micromanage the former police detective. That of course has been proven wrong. When he came back at DCEC, Katlholo had long retired. He was persuaded back and he agreed, I am told reluctantly. Patriotism, a sense of duty and honour drove him back.
He believed what he was being told. Katlholo too was wrong for taking Masisi at his word. Masisi speaks very persuasively. But he says one thing and does another. At least that is how he has governed so far. His speeches often sound very coherent. But the manner he governs has been shambolic, to put it mildly. The fast and tough talk laced with management consultancy jargon often belies personal interest. It is for that reason that in less than three years the president has been able to totally forfeit a reputation of honest deal making he had promised upon arrival. His treatment of people including those considered as allies shows not just a cavalier attitude but also a heartlessness and shocking lack of compassion.
Tymon Katlholo is just one example. Under oath Katlholo told a parliamentary Public Accounts Committee that Botswana was on the throes of a runaway corruption crisis. His DCEC, he said was investigating P600 million worth of corruption money all of it swindled in a space of under a year. This was news to a shocked nation. For many Batswana the president had his job cut for him. He had come into office under a strong anti-corruption ticket. Long before Katlholo spoke, it was always an open secret that some key figures at Office of the President were knee-deep in nefarious activities. These were people within the president’s inner circle. The nation awaited in baited breath. But Katlholo’s statement to PAC proved a bridge too high. The following morning Office of the President suspended him. At this point he had been engaged in a tussle with the intelligence services.
Katlholo had somehow made a calculation that his sacking by OP would be a costly enterprise for the guys there to contemplate. Wrongly, he had believed that the potential of a public backlash would prevail as a restraint over people at OP. He imagined that this office worked under normal rules and standards. Not for the first time he was wrong. He found out rather too late that this government subscribed to a different code than the one he had known in his previous life at the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime. By the time they suspended him, he realized too that this government also had different conventions from the ones he had known. By that time it was too late. Katlholo should have known better.
The moment he set his eyes on key guys at OP the stakes were immediately raised too high. Today the future of DCEC is bleak. People often complain that DCEC is controlled from Office of the President. That will soon sound like an innocuous statement. Henceforth the DCEC is likely to be run from DIS. Events at DCEC have tested the public patience on Masisi. The duplicity of suspending from office one of the country’s most revered public servants who the president had called out of retirement to come and help stabilize the DCEC has not gone unnoticed. The suspension has also led many people to question the president’s real grip on the government operations. The president remains in power, but events at DCEC have cost him a big chunk of his moral authority. Accusations of him being captured have now reached fever pitch. Significantly, the corruption busting agency now resembles a castrated bull.
It cannot be expected to recover to get back to do the work it was created to do. Fighting corruption demands a long term strategy. But under this government it has often looked like a fire-fighting operation – four directors general at DCEC in four years. There is no doubt that investor confidence too has been hurt. Restoring that confidence will take a lot of hard and sustained work. That involves getting people to trust the president again. That’s a big ask. The priority for the president is to get people to forget events that led to the arrest and suspension of police Commissioner, Keabetswe Makgophe. These are the same events that led to the suspension of Tymon Katlholo after he mentioned that at least P600 million of public money had been embezzled. The two are intimately related. It will be interesting to see how in the next few months the president seizes and manages to change the narrative.
