Ian Khama addresses looming court battle

Former President Ian Khama has dismissed reports that he is attempting to flee arrest in Botswana, but claims his successor, Mokgweetsi Masisi, had been using state institutions to go after him since their relations soured two years ago. He said he also found it strange that Pretoria isn’t speaking out against this more openly. ‘The (South African) Government itself has kept very quiet about it, from my perspective,' he is quoted as saying by the Daily Maverick. ‘I don’t know whether they just decided to take the position that this thing is before the courts and (the courts) must handle it, but certainly they could have investigated, as they had means to.’ In the court case, against former intelligence agent Welheminah Maswabi, allegations were made that Khama and SA businesswoman Bridgette Motsepe took more than $10bn out of Botswana and deposited it in bank accounts in SA. There were also no records at the Reserve Bank of any amounts equivalent to roughly half of Botswana’s GDP entering the country. The court case was thrown out in August, but a mandamus application by AfriForum’s Gerrie Nel, on behalf of the Botswana prosecuting authorities, appears to be going ahead. Khama said if he and Motsepe had wanted to move so much money, they would have had to transfer it from the entities in which it was invested. ‘You would have had to go through fund managers and people in the bank to have moved the money,’ he said, adding that the prosecuting authority had not attempted to get any witnesses to that effect for the case.