Is Khama's charisma a poisoned chalice? (Part 1)

KEINEETSE KEINEETSE
Correspondent | Friday May 30, 2008 00:00

 

Ian Khama is president, king and heir to the great house of Khama, and as such, both a modern leader of a country as well as a traditional leader of one of the biggest ethnic communities, not tribes, of his country.

Brown is a Scotsman who, according to British tradition, does not come from the inner circles of power as he is not even English, but he is largely a self made man. Ian Khama, on the other hand, was predestined, and almost by fate, to the leadership of his country.
Khama grew up in the State House. At 12, Brown was selling newspapers in the street while Khama was at that age rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty, the cream of royalty and of the world's statesmen on the lawns of the State House. At 16, Gordon Brown was at university. Even at that early age he had chosen the side in which he was going to make his political contributions to society. Even as a freshman he took to editing a student publication, training his mental faculties and again making his voice heard while Khama was looking at the machinery of state, which it was his fate to inherit, not from below but from a bird's eye view. On the ground he was trying his hands on the controls, playing with scramblers at the police college or army he was destined to command.
Now, both Ian Khama and Gordon Brown are presiding over the affairs of their nations, not because of any popular vote to themselves individually, but through a loophole and constitutional tampering, political maneuvering and other types of power playing schemes that make an aberration of democracy look like the most normal thing.

Even considering the processes of their meteoric rise to power, comparison peters away. While Gordon Brown comes through as a gifted academic in his own right, a thoroughbred technocrat, a mastermind in backroom politics, a smart and hard working man who became the longest serving Chancellor of the Exchequer, little of the sort can be said of for Botswana's fourth President.

Those closest to him say he is an able, no nonsense army leader who made it to brigadier at the tender age of 24. While this, in the African context, may be a very strong point in favour of Khama, many would say his rise there was honorary and titular because his father was commander of the army.

Democracy by its very nature makes for open contestation, making  that a defining moment when, like in America today, men and women who seek to lead their societies are given platforms from which to articulate their personal visions, articulate what they perceive as public aspirations, make commitments to certain courses of action that are deemed necessary and redemptive to lift societies seeking guidance to new destinations, before they receive the glory of the baton of power. 

While there a is tendency to make a fetish of democracy, it may also provide for all kinds of political chicanery, making loopholes and short cuts that those in power usually manipulate with absolute impunity. It is such manipulation that has ushered our two leaders into the most powerful offices of their lands. But once they have settled at the helm of their societies, new social dynamics have started to emerge.

Conventional wisdom takes the state as an arbiter between conflicting social classes. It is this tension that ultimately will decide not only the nature of the regime but also the lifespan of a regime, as well as the pace of social change. What with usually turbulent relations between the different social strata that makes the clients of the state. The classic contradiction between producers of wealth and the owners of the means of production -the armies of workers who are usually hard placed against the wall and the employers with their tendency for conspicuous consumption, the intelligentsia with their perennial doubts and the hoi polloi in between that, may be swayed this way and that, while the state pretends to be an honest broker in the middle. It is here where the mantle of men like Brown and Khama will be tested.  Already the cracks are starting to show on the wall. 

About a month ago, I wrote a somewhat pessimistic article that said in Botswana  we had arrived at our own Golgotha. Many have blamed me as unduly alarmist and failing to reflect accurately the euphoric political climate as it currently obtains in the country. I can only sympathise.  That article was inspired by, among other things, what appears to be a ready political capitulation of the civil administration after four decades of steady rule, to a group of carefully hand-picked military operatives. 

Though there are no turbulences of protest about the undemocratic nature of automatic succession, the public generally, at least if we go by the ratings of the elite radio phone-in programmes, seems to be quite content with the arrival of Khama at helm of state. In the UK, Gordon Borwn has received his first - and I believe not last - bruising as the Labour Party lost the control of the city of London to the conservatives.

Many commentators on the African political scene are quick to point out to the impossibility of democracy and change in Africa while also pointing out the fact that democracy is not yet entrenched; that traditional power systems are still holding sway and that democracy seems to work only in the first world where the public is better informed, where public office is clearly detached from the individuals that hold it.
Well, that is a subject of an interesting debate. The truth is that Africa has indeed tended so display an uncanny incapacity for real change. After the nationalist revolutions of the sixties, there has been little or no change at all. Fathers have merely passed on the baton to their sons while there is less and less public debate and participation in the policy-making process.   

There can be no denying that governance in Africa has tended towards a messianic type of rule. The venerable fathers of independence are not going away.  It is this scenario that President Khama has inherited. Few are already expressing alarm at the way the new president deals with national issues. While there has been a persistent problem of incapacity to implement government policy, some say the new president's way of dealing with problems is an inclination to the spectacular, where important policy shifts are made at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately, this earns him the label of being non-consultative. This tendency toward unilateralism has unfortunately been the hallmark of Africa's tyrannical rulers who do not have anybody to account to.

A Sunday newspaper columnist has made the phrase 'throwing money at problems' a popular phrase. This sounds like an unkindly serious indictment when taken against a presumed tradition of fiscal frugality. But how far true is the assertion that the new president is 'throwing money' at problems when the same newspaper that carries the caution announces that in Francistown's largest referral hospitals, people are dying from preventable causes for lack of theatre space and equipment?

Is it throwing money at problems when the new president has decided that in a country that is reputed to have a GDP of some US$ 3,500, the spectre of unemployed graduates is unbecoming and that the victims be paid subsistence allowances until they can get placing.

What then is the meaning of frugality when newspapers report that people in certain districts are eating soil for lack of food while the country boasts of several years' worth of supplies in foreign reserves that is said to be kept for unforeseen difficult times ahead?
While nobody will advocate for the squandering of the hard-earned foreign reserves, does it make sense to contemplate a future while the present is unlivable?

There is no intention on my part to retract any part of that article though it is admissible that 45 days in the life of any regime can seem a short period to undertake any meaningful evaluation. Today I would like to discuss how liberal representative democracy has played itself out in Britain and in Botswana. There seems to me to be fertile ground for comparison.

The first is the historical connection between our two countries. The second relates to the power and influence of the two leaders.  It is also a known fact that those who have authored our liberal democracy were under the spell and influence of the Westminster type of democracy, though in recent years there has seemed to be a shift toward the American type of representative democracy.  

Both the present heads of state in both Britain and Botswana have come to power through some kind of constitutional maneuvering of the political machinery of their given polities. Both men rode on the past glory of those that preceded them. Ian Khama is riding largely on the legacy of his father's charisma. Brown seems to have inherited a discredited state in the aftermath of the Tony Blair and George Bush alliance and hard ball politics in the Middle East. Yet the political environment that such maneuvering has ushered in is quiet different in the areas of public endorsement, the regional balance of forces, globalisation and the militarisation of African politics and geo political factors.

To be continued