Magang speaks on Masire, Mogae and Khama

| Friday July 11, 2008 00:00

Below are some excerpts from the book relating to his experiences in broadcasting, politics and national elections.

On GBC: 'It is not easy to claim credit for something that began illegally, but at the time when Batswana were watching the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) television without its sanction, I had a hand in the inspiration of unauthorised access to their programming.

In 1978, a gentleman of Portuguese origin who was working as a motor mechanic at Angamia Motors in Gaborone approached me to apply for a TV licence on his behalf. I did not have an encouraging response. I had previously failed to do the same on behalf of another client as there was no specific law regarding the matter in Botswana.

He said the technology was simple. All he needed was to erect a makeshift receiver on Kgale Hill. I told him to go ahead and undertook to defend him juristically if he got into trouble with the relevant authorities.

The antenna was erected at Kgale Hill. Intriguingly, no one complained, including the late president and the then Minister of Works, Transport and Communications, Jimmy Haskins, who were among the first to enjoy this free television broadcast. The South African authorities too, looked the other way. They saw in the development, I thought, a convenient way of marketing South African products, which indeed they did for the next 25 years.

The private TV station that arose from this development was called Gaborone Broadcasting Corporation or GBC. I was expecting my client to be charged for illegal broadcasting at some time or the other and so I refrained from availing myself of the station's service till two years later when most of the Gaborone elite had 'signed up'. I could not have been more wrong. GBC continues to exist to this day, legally'. (Pg 283)
On Mokama: 'It dawned on him that I was not a bad fellow after all, that he had rashly condemned me as his mortal foe. He did not expressly confess this to me, but he implied it. He was later to rise to become Botswana's first indigenous Chief Justice, just as he had been the country's first indigenous Attorney-General. When he died, we had long buried the hatchet. I was extremely delighted by the eventual thaw in our relations as it has always been in my nature not to hold grudges or perpetuate antagonistic stand-offs. My inclination is to try and make sure bridges are built again quickly. Your foe is, after all, your neighbour, and you cannot be in a state of enmity with your neighbour forever. Yet, just as Mokama and I were toasting to our reconciliatory epoch, a new foe was looming large on the political horizon, more determined than Mokama had ever been, to make life particularly difficult for me. He was not a come-from-nowhere menace. He was my fellow tribesman and a cousin, albeit a distant one. His name was DK (Daniel Kwelagobe)'. (Pg 284)

On ministrial appointment: 'Finally, my day arrived. And it probably did so thanks to an act of electoral impropriety in the conduct of the 1984 general election.

After the said elections, a sealed ballot box was found stashed somewhere in the office of the President; not in H.E.'s office but in the wider administrative premises. 

Somehow, the box had gone into hibernation after being transported along with others from Tshiamo polling station in Gaborone for safekeeping in this highly secured building. In this ugly taint on Botswana democracy, the supervisor of elections, Festus Mogae, declared the poll in the constituency involved - Gaborone South - which was held and had been won by Vice President, Peter Mmusi - null and void.

A fresh round of elections was consequently decreed after the Botswana High Court okayed the decision of the supervisor. In the new by-elections, Mmusi was trounced by BNF leader Kenneth Koma. Given the opprobrium of the Tshiamo ballot box incident, many people, including BDP members, saw this as a deserved outcome. President Masire was devastated, not because Mmusi's performance as VP was particularly stellar, but because the two were such bosom friends.

The president was in a fix. He wanted Mmusi back into office, and the only statutory way of doing this was through the oft-repeated circus of 'specially elected MP'. However, this avenue had been sealed immediately after the general election,  and the only viable means now was for an incumbent MP to give way to the second highest ranking politician in the land. Who was to be the sacrificial lamb?'

My day in parliament: 'I was sworn in by PSP Festus Mogae as other members of cabinet watched, without a letter of appointment and without a formal briefing by the appointing authority, H.E. himself'.

As minister: 'Neither the president, who commissioned me into the job, nor my own boss, Peter Mmusi, had formulated a job description for me. I had a job, but no express responsibility. I pestered Mmusi to assign me work, but all he did was equivocate. Nothing definitive was forthcoming from him. Certain of his gestures in fact suggested I should await instructions from my own juniors - the government technocrats in the ministry.

On Civil Servants
Throughout my tenure as cabinet minister, I was appalled by the power of civil servants and the sway of expatriates, particularly those from the West.

If there was one country in which ministers were the quintessential figureheads, that country was Botswana. Civil servants were the minister's conscience. They invariably made all the decisions and presented them to the minister as a foregone conclusion. They hardly even provided a range stamp, and therefore validate, the wishes of the bureaucrats under him. Ministers read speeches whose ramifications they barely understood and which were bent to somebody else's will; for instance, when Mmusi gave a speech, I could easily tell whose views among his senior officials it essentially reflected'.

Ministry of Finance: 'Of all the ministries, the MFDP was, in my own reckoning, the most beholden to foreign manipulation. The neo-colonial hangover just never seemed to dissipate in my beloved country, even among people whose extended years of education had liberated them from perceptual benightedness. One would have thought that with an increasing sense of self-awareness and with a sizeable cadre of well-educated economists among the ranks of the ministry's staff, we would by this time be relying n our own wisdom. We were not.

Even our five year national development plans were crafted, navigated and supervised by Western University in Canada - hardcore capitalist countries whose hands-off economic systems did not allow for centrally directed national development plans. Where then, I wondered, did our guru institutions get the experience from? Certainly, it was not from their own countries' economies.

Mogae and I: In 1n 1989, after my re-appointment as Assistant Minister of Finance, I met impregnably stiff opposition from the likes of Baledzi Gaolathe and Kenneth Matambo, who were keener to vote funds or sign guarantees for motor vehicle loan schemes for civil servants than for real estate acquisition. Unfortunately, my boss this time around, Festus Mogae, did not support me either. And Masire: I returned home late one evening in October, 1989; the general election had just been concluded two days or so before and the triumphant president, Quett Masire, had been sworn in earlier in the day.

As I was ambling down the corridors of parliament, we ran into each other. Following the usual salutations, I rendered my apologies for having not returned his call in time as I had arrived home rather late. The president promptly got to the point. He rang to inform me of his intention to appoint me again to cabinet. My absence, he proceeded, had almost cost me a ministerial position. This was o jest on his part. He sounded fairly serious.

I struggled to betray my sense of incredulity at this assertion, wondering how genuinely objective political appointments were if one could forfeit consideration simply by one's absence at the time communication to that effect was made. Or was the president simply conveying to me the dismissive message that, 'I may have appointed you, Magang, but there are a host of others who I could make do with in your stead?' Hallucinating: If I thought that under Festus Mogae my position would assume a new, much more potent garb, I was hallucinating. I was as much on the fringes as I had been under Peter Mmusi. The only significant difference was that, whereas my relations with Mmusi generally conformed to protocol, long-standing friend. Although he was my boss, we remained on first name terms.

Festus, too, did not assign me particular responsibilities. I employed the same tactic I had used under Mmusi, tip-toeing into his office when he was holding meetings with departmental officials. However, with Festus, I did this less guardedly, as I had a little bit of licence, which, of course, was rooted in our age old familiarity.

Festus was more respected by the bureaucrats in the ministry than Mmusi had been. With a first degree from Oxford and a masters in economics from Sussex University, he had venerable credentials.

Getting along with Festus: Like most economists, Festus was frugal and prone to dilatoriness. He could go to great lengths to debate the pros and cons of resource allocation in a particular direction. His decision-making pace was leisurely, ponderous and inquisitive, which I marked out as his greatest weakness. There were times, in fact, when I thought he was unnecessarily argumentative and a kind of Mr Know-it-all. But far from resenting his demeanour, I elected to put up with it as it was a common tendency among people of his field of learning. In any case, Festus and I had learnt to be tolerant of each other since our boarding school days.

On Masire
Uhu! As a by-the-way, the president asked my opinion as to who would be the best replacement for Peter Mmusi. I found this question surprising. I knew as much as anybody else in cabinet that he was so enamoured of Festus Mogae, who had been his Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning and his presidential permanent secretary for 10 years.

It was like a man of enormous fortune seeking advice as to who should inherit his riches when he had only one child. Thus, I told the president that since he had such a predilection for Mogae, he represented the best pick as far as I was concerned. On the other hand, if, in the very unlikely event that he found Festus to be wanting in one way or the other, veteran politician Mout Ngwao, or Mompati Merafhe, the Minister of Presidential Affairs and Public Administration, were equally capable people.

The Vice Precidency
Why I was not Vice President: In appraising myself, it was not because I possessed a particularly sterling quality that I thought I was cut out for higher office. What inspired me was that when I studied the people who had previously held the position, they possessed nothing, intrinsically or extrinsically, that I did not possess myself. Thus, when Mogae bypassed me and went for a much younger man, I did not hide my displeasure. Once again, I had failed to realise my dream not by dint of my individual shortcomings but because factors wholly beyond my control held powerful sway.

Masire the tortoise: If Masire was outstanding as a minister, he did not live up to his billing as president. The one great malady that afflicted him was indecision. The man could just not make up his mind on most issues in reasonable time. For instance, in 1994, he took almost a week to form a cabinet, as if it was a jigsaw puzzle he was piecing together. (Pg 474)

Khama nearly quit politics
In March 2003, a certain Kabo Morwaeng, who had earlier defected to the opposition, applied for re-admission and was issued a membership card by the BDP executive secretary. However, his re-admission was done unilaterally. There had been no consensus among the party heavyweights. The Nkate-Merafhe faction did not have a problem with him, whereas the Kedikilwe-Kwelagobe faction strongly objected. Festus, who was generally pro the Nkate-Merafhe group, sided with their rivals; on the other hand, the vice president saw no reason why Morwaneng should not be signed up.

Later, in July of the same year, the vice president told me he had considered quitting politics over the Morwaeng affair, but he opted to stay chiefly because he did not want to leave the party at the mercy of elements bent on gratifying their own colossal egos, which in the long term would be detrimental to the party. I need not be direct about who these elements were, but the vice president made a wise decision. If he had left the party when it was a sinking ship, his father, who had founded it, would scarcely have smiled on him from yonder in Abraham's bosom.