The talented Mr DGB
Bongi D D M Radipati | Tuesday November 18, 2025 08:37
Primary colors are red, blue and yellow. When any two primary colors are mixed, several secondary colors are created. In other words, primary colors are the source and progenitor of other colors. In Botswana, and for present purposes, primary colors are relevant for two main reasons. First, the primary colors of red and blue, respectively, are the dominant colors of the past ruling political party which lost the last general elections, and the current ruling coalition party led by DGB, while yellow is the dominant color of the junior political party in the ruling coalition. Second, primary colors symbolize how a political life typically demands the mixing of personal values and ambitions with political opportunism, which leads to transformation. That is the interesting, if depressing reality of the private cost of public power.
The neatness of the beginning of the 2nd year of DGB's presidency in November 2025 is that it is a chance to offer a prognosis of that presidency in the next 4 years by assessing it at the end of its inaugural year. I begin it from this provocative assessment. Because of the irony provided by his personal experience, and his intuitive grasp of the lives of ordinary people here, DGB had the best chance of not sacrificing idealism and good intentions on the altars of opportunity and greed.
In his University of Botswana student's days, DGB campaigned and managed to win an election for the presidency of the University’s students’ representative council. The seed for his harboring of a leadership role was planted then. Indicative of the seriousness by which he took his studies, he later resigned from the position because as he always said it, he was worried that it was affecting his academic performance. After graduation, he quickly followed in the footsteps of a few clever citizens by enrolling at Harvard for graduate studies. Having been fascinated by it, on his return and in short order, he managed to be that university's most public and vocal cheerleader in this country. The traits of his Ivy League mentors have always impressed DGB. Take this one simple example. DGB admired their credentials: their prolific writing, earned PhDs, youthful professorships, and professional memberships. And he admired that notwithstanding this, they never called themselves by any title. Now as a titled leader, that previous admiration, that modesty held against expectation, appears perversely lost to him.
Once back from graduate studies and teaching at UB, DGB made it his trademark to dress in the preppy and Ivy League styles, essentially the dress code of republican patricians everywhere else. Simultaneously, in class, he regaled his students with big letter law and phantasmagorical tales of his life and graduate studies. In turn, his students made him one of the most favored lecturers of his generation. But possibly bored and demoralized by the languorous nature of academia, he quit it after 10 years and went full-time into legal practice. In that venture he thrived as he soon became the legal profession’s boss and consequently had a national stage, a vital platform, to himself. By the time the presidency of a united opposition was bestowed on him, DGB had cemented his reputation as an overconfident, bombastic speaker who had not come to politics to play. Therefore, the talent of DGB lies in his self-dramatized and dramatic rise to the presidency of this country. It also lies in how his ascendancy reminds us that a linear trajectory is not always required to harbor and gain grand ambitions: sometimes an outsider's bona fides are sufficient.
A brilliant, if city-sleek, central Botswana citizen, of a bi-tribal Tswana-Xhosa lineage, DGB must have been mindful of the attraction of his unusual birth, his outsider status as one not schooled by the country's public service, and his handsomeness. It is no small wonder that his presumptive political godfather, his idol, was the fourth president of this country. They shared nothing politically as DGB is moderately progressive and tolerant while the other, is a royalist and conservative. But they both had intriguing births and physical attractiveness. To complete his public persona, a united opposition - part socialists, part social democrats, part nationalists, and part disenchanted - in thrall to his erudition and raw sophistication, tasked him with being the face of his and their world, and of explaining his and their world, to the establishment that he had joined as an academic and a lawyer. In his winning of the general elections in October 2024 under their ticket, and with extensive election promises, DGB had a lot to do for them and the country. He couldn't as the country is basically broke. Yet, he has quickly transformed himself and carried along several members of his coalition administration into the fullest incarnation of small-time capitalists and acquisitive elites just as their predecessors had done previously. Given this, it stands to reason that DGB's talent lies in his natural evolution, really his persistence to be himself, instead of a reinvention of what he wasn't - modest and frugal - to begin with.
In another age, DGB's rise might have been taken as proof that the Botswana dream of amounting to something from nowhere was still possible and even attainable. But our times have few inspiring examples to follow, and even fewer tales of big political accomplishment against the odds. In any case, each chapter of DGB's success is ironically part of a demoralizing national failure. By every measure, the country’s economy is in the doldrums. There is a palpable abandonment of the civic virtues of acting for the common weal and being other-regarding. Additionally, it is now acceptable to embrace a dominant elite that combines its self-aggrandizement with an orthodoxy of populism. Here again is DGB's talent. While the country has taken a wrong turn in the last couple of decades, and there is an undeniable loss of real promise for the rank and file, he enjoys one advantage over all his critical adversaries. He can always lay the blame for the crisis bequeathed to his administration at the doorstep of the long-term government of the political party that he and his coalition vanquished.
DGB knows that no moral philosophy endorses greed as a supreme aim of life; no major faith permits the accumulation of wealth as a human purpose; and no political ideology upholds profit over human dignity. Yet these tragic things continue to happen in Botswana during his watch. But he is sufficiently lucky to secure a second term because the other competitor politicians, perhaps out of the greater sin of their nihilistic tendencies or the lesser sin of their irrelevance, appear to offer the country's voters no real alternatives. In any event, at the onset of his administration and repeatedly thereafter, DGB and his officials have asserted that his government is centered around human rights. Now “human rights” is a word like “motherhood.” It is just something that nobody in their right mind can ever be against. Both words give substance to hope. They also give form to dreams. Touted in the euphoria of a new administration following an historic election victory, a commitment to human rights heightens expectations and minimizes cynicism about the good intentions of that government. But, little has been done about human rights (such as capital punishment, the minimum wage, etc) thus far and we cannot help it but wonder if this term was a mere slogan or ruse. Worse, we are inclined to regard it as the deceptive means that justified the attainment of political power, whatever it required.
One year into his presidential tenure, DGB's embrace of power is so complete that it is also physical. His hitherto shrill, activist voice of the campaign period is now often replaced by a condescending voice, sometimes a taunt, to the public service elite who have to pay obeisance to him if they know what is good for them. Of course at a personal level, DGB is still a ponderous and considerate man, and unlike some of his predecessors, he bears no grudges. Additionally, reminiscent of his days as a lecturer, each time he addresses young students, glints of sincerity and tenderness in his eyes re-awaken, and his modulated voice acknowledges the potential of every one of them.
As president, DGB is still handsome but he is less appealing. His loss of appeal is not physical but perceptual. With his flamboyance and extravagance at a difficult time for almost everyone in this country, it is impossible to claim that he represents our ordinary people better than his competitors. Yet his other talent lies here. As with the coalition that he led and is now this country's new government, his transformation is animated by what that coalition finds contemptuous about other political parties: their ostentatious piety together with their failure to change the previous government. If lady luck keeps smiling on him, in four years’ time, that coalition may still give DGB the second and last term in office. It will probably do so for two reasons. One, on the belief that he is still one of them, despite everything. And two, on the acceptance that, despite everything, he is living the life that they desire for every citizen in this country.
*Radipati is a Mmegi contributor