Still on direct election of President

I must not be misunderstood to suggest that if a President is highly educated, then he will be a highly efficient President. After all the highly educated President Mogae was probably the worst President ever to befall this country. However, the reasons for Mogae’s bad performance are quite different from Khama’s failures.

Under Mogae the people appointed into critical economic positions knew that he was watching. They could not insolently ransack the treasury or the economy because they knew that he was capable of analyzing their actions and catching them. So, the smart thieves, the kind that easily bring the country to its knees if given the opportunity, kept their dirty fingers from the NDB, the Bank of Botswana and other vital economic organs.

Mogae’s failures have a lot to do with his lack of a constituency. Because he had no powerful backers such as the Bangwato tribe behind his Presidency, he substituted PARTY for constituency. As a result only those who were unmistakably identified with his party, the BDP were ever considered for appointment to vital positions in Government. It did not matter how well one merited appointment to a critical economic decision-making position, if one did not wear a red shirt/blouse and a black skirt/trousers, one was doomed to spend their lives doing mundane non challenging chores. Thus Mogae’s over-dependence on the PARTY, resulted in the country having a bevy of incapable officials, all clad in the PARTY’s colours and all depending on foreign expertise for their survival.

Khama’s failures on the other hand stem from his inability to engage the experts and question the actions of his appointees to public office. To overcome this shortcoming he escapes from the office to go “interect with the masses”.  The smart white collar thieves love this. When he is away in the bush they ransack the NDB and generally cause economic mayhem. Khama’s solid constituency offers him no relief in this, because what he needs is hard, solid educational grounding, which he severely lacks. The sad part is that he will almost certainly win any “direct elections” as envisaged by the Motion currently before Parliament.