Information coming from diplomatic circles indicates that preparations are at an advanced stage for President Ian Khama to visit the Kingdom of Swaziland.
It matters little whether in diplomatic parlance it is an official or private visit.
While in Swaziland, Khama will most likely touch base at his alma mater, Waterford, a prestigious boarding school that in the sixties and seventies was an exclusive haven for children of the African elite and colonial administrators. 
A private audience with King Mswati is a given.
Khama’s visit to Swaziland is an overdue visit.
For some time now, Swaziland has been under the world radar, and not for all the good reasons.
If not urgently attended to, Swaziland could very well become a failed state.
Not only is Swaziland undergoing an economic meltdown, political events in that country hint at an inevitable showdown between the establishment and the masses.
Public servants have gone for months without salaries.
Revenue from the customs union pool is no longer enough to sustain the King’s obscene lifestyle and also pay salaries for government employees.
As we speak, South Africa, which has traditionally acted as the kingdom’s reliable patron, has withheld a $2billion lifeboat loan because King Mswati does not want to implement a chest of preconditions set for him by Pretoria.
At the centre of it all is the unbanning of political parties and instituting political reforms.
For over forty years now, Swaziland has been run on a state of emergency decree.
The long running state of emergency is a fallacious aberration that is no longer defensible, not even by the King’s most ardent adherents.
The message that President Khama should take to Swaziland is that one way or another change will come to the people of Swaziland.
And the best that King Mswati can do is to come up with political reforms that would allow him not only to manage those changes but also to be a part of them.
Continuing to be rigid as he seems intent on doing will render him irrelevant.
President Khama should advise Mswati that by resisting change, as the young monarch has up to now done, will in the fullness of time make him not only an irrelevant relic but also a legitimate target of forces over which he will wield not the slightest power.
There is no question that President Khama has a soft spot for Mswati, which is why Botswana government has steadfastly resisted calls to criticise Swaziland’s excesses.
Not unfairly, detractors have often wondered just how it has been that President Khama cannot see so many bad things in Swaziland which is his backyard yet was able to see incidents in faraway places like Syria and Libya.
We may have won some short-term accolades from the West for it, but in so far as they have consistently defied the letter and spirit of SADC and the African Union, pronouncements from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are more acts of showmanship and attention seeking tactics rather than genuine desire to influence events around the world.
These clear-cut acts of duplicity and double standards are behind accusations that Botswana’s foreign policy is premised on hypocrisy and showmanship rather than a genuine concern to extend frontiers of political freedom.
A key history lesson that President Khama should teach Mswati is that if the King wants to retain power, he must be prepared to share some of it.
President Khama has a duty to remind Mswati that the king has a lot to learn from the contemporary history of South Africa, especially as it pertains to the last apartheid era president of that country, FW de Klerk.
Apartheid could easily have survived on for ten or even fifteen more years.
But ever clear-sighted, FW De Klerk was more than all of his compatriots most awake to the fact that waiting any longer could put the whites on a back foot and take events out of their power and influence.
Unusual for a privileged Afrikaner, De Klerk was abnormally conscious of the fact that delaying the arrival of democracy any further would ultimately and inevitably lead to a situation where the whites were literally dragged out of power, with no bargaining cheap, probably violently and at a pace much faster than they would ever have planned. 
When President Khama meets the king, he should tell him that Swaziland economic meltdown was not inevitable, more to the point that it is a manmade calamity at the centre of which gross mismanagement by the young king himself and his hand-picked cronies that make up his council of ministers.
More crucially, the President should also add that continued banning of political parties might ultimately lead to the implosion of the king’s power.
Foreign policy remains a big black hole that continues to undermine Khama’s presidency, an unpardonable betrayal given the clear strength of Botswana as a brand in diplomatic circles.
This is mainly to do with the fact that, under him, Botswana has done absolutely nothing to engender let alone cultivate meaningful international friendships, liaisons and networks save for Tanzania and, of course, (one has to be fair) his new found love for Liberia.
This is altogether surprising given the fact that despite many lapses on areas of civil liberties under Khama, Botswana’s residual international brand has in the main continued to be very strong.
As yet there is no indication that Botswana, or to be more specific, President Ian Khama, is in a hurry to deploy that brand to reclaim the country’s position.
We have been on an isolation mode. And the President’s so-called private visit to Swaziland may just provide the Damascene turn we all so desperately crave for in our foreign policy.
