Masisi a victim of alarmist intelligence

In March 2003, the Bush administration launched airstrikes on Saddam Hussein’s Presidential Palace and military targets, starting a war that arguably led to the decline of the US as a global power. Precipitating the war, was Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s assessment, that the Iraqi government had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and that it was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program. The Agency did not adequately explain just how little good intelligence it had on Iraq, or how much its assessments were driven by assumptions and inferences rather than concrete evidence. It simply seized on WMDs narrative because they concluded, it represented the strongest case for an invasion. The Agency served a political purpose, to build public support for the war. It turned out Iraq had no WMDs and that it ended its nuclear weapon program in 1991.

There are certainly parallels that can be drawn between the CIA’s Iraq flop and Brigadier Peter Magosi’s P100 billion ‘theft’ claim by Welheminah ‘Butterfly’ Maswabi and associates. Firstly, they were primarily driven by political (electioneering) rather than security considerations. And secondly, they ended up in national embarrassment and foreign policy disaster. In our case, the issue has not only driven a wedge deep between Botswana and South

Africa, it has also given the latter, pretext to openly support former president Ian Khama’s ‘destabilization’ efforts. The lesson is, security and intelligence services, the need for which cannot be in doubt, must not become a ‘state within the state,’ exempted from accountability for their actions. Such lack of accountability leads to a dangerous culture of impunity, which undermines the very foundations of democratic institutions. The last thing the nation’s leaders should do is to mistake political opinion, to homeland security threat. As thus, it is critical to identify what national security is not.

With the 2024 general election approaching, so are false alarms, false flag operations, imagined threats and outrageous lies. The fundamental commonality between Kgosi and Magosi’s DIS, is their ardent believe in the employment of fear as an instrument of control. The divergence being, on where and how to apply it. While Kgosi applied it on the general populace, Magosi seems to be applying it on President Mokgweetsi Masisi. As far as I am concerned, Masisi is a helpless victim of fear and blackmail. He is constantly reminded by his top spy of an ever-present danger of imaginary assassins lurking in shadows and ready to pull the trigger. And Khama and Kgosi are his best bogeymen.

And they too are playing the role to perfection. Why not, after all, at one point, Magosi was the bogeyman. They have just swapped the roles. I even doubt Magosi wants to see Khama and Kgosi out of this soap opera anytime soon. They are the very reason he is here. Their demise, is his demise.

Since Masisi took office in 2018, he has been constantly sold the story of how his life is in grave danger. If indeed there is an active and imminent threat against the President, why has it been allowed to linger for this long, unless it is imaginary. Under normal circumstances, we must be talking about that threat in past tenses.

Otherwise, it would mean Magosi is incompetent, of which there is little or nothing proving otherwise. Awkwardly, the very man who has been preaching to us, how much the life of the President is in danger, allows him to drive himself around and about. It then becomes safe for us to conclude that, these ‘threats’ are engineered towards instilling fear in Masisi, while at the same time, extracting public sympathy for him and the ruling BDP. Blackmail is intelligence agencies’ most preferred deception tool. President Masisi must not allow fear to anchor his psychosis and policy formulation. He must remain resolute and where possible, demand evidence beyond word of mouth, because once bitten twice shy.