State of the Usual: What Have Masisi And Khama Been Talking About?

The State of the Nation Address (SONA) does two things: One, it serves as a national scorecard in which the president puts current events in calm and codifiable context. Two, the annual event offers a reflection and rundown of an administration’s successes and goals and an assessment of the path ahead. [ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type="show" ihc_mb_who="1,2,3,4" ihc_mb_template="3" ] A comparative analysis of 10 SONA speeches by President Mokgweetsi Masisi and former president Ian Khama seems to give a glimpse of the priorities they had for the nation. The Business Weekly & Review analysed elements of the two presidents’ speeches to extract phrases or words frequently used in a given SONA speech in their respective first terms in office. The intention was to transform words into insights by identifying and visualising patterns in the speeches to find the main messages, as well as key differences and similarities. Our analysis shows that Khama typically delivered longer speeches with an average length of 14200 words versus Masisi’s average length of 10800 words. The longest state of the nation address was delivered by Khama in 2011 with more than 18 000 words, its tone consistent with his obsession with military discipline. The shortest was just over 7400 words delivered by President Masisi some seven months after succeeding Khama. From the onset, Masisi had significant hardening of thoughts – betraying longheld suspicions that he was going to become Khama’s lapdog. In his inaugural SONA speech in 2018, Masisi used the word “democracy” three times more than his predecessor had done in his inaugural SONA address a decade earlier. SONA is generally an opportunity for familiar rhetoric and posturing by the party in government. Khama and Masisi lack of Obamasque charisma, eloquence and PR skills set is not surprising because both were charity picks, the ruling Botswana Democtratic Party (BDP) not being known for rewarding merit when it comes to appointing its leaders. A dissection of Khama speech patterns suggests that the unusual way he speaks has its roots in oral culture. He rallies his audience through impassioned targeted conversation, even if this is one-sided and usually doesn’t follow a clear narrative arc. Masisi, on the other hand, uses language to create a brand for himself. His 2020 SONA speech had a certain modernist impetus to it, leveraging a feeling of strength, a sense of determination and an impression that he gets things done. He doesn’t. But the majority of the speeches lacked the conceptual anchor for practical reasoning, a factor that explains poor project implementation. After removing common words, such as ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, etc., ‘government’, unsurprisingly, emerges as the most popular topic in terms of mentions per 1000 words across speeches. Masisi refers to ‘government’ slightly more often than Khama (21/1000 words compared with Khama’s 14/1000 words. While development should have been Khama’s defining mantra, it is Masisi who mentioned development-related terms far more frequently than Khama during his first term in office. Among word-pairs, Masisi’s top ones were ‘Botswana’, ‘government’ and ‘development’. Khama’s most popular word-pairs include ‘us’, ‘public’ and ‘Botswana’— suggesting a storytelling approach to his speeches. Khama spoke more about the economy, reflecting the challenges he might have faced during the 2008 credit crunch. Masisi has spoken more about education and health, reflecting his training as a teacher. Words such as corruption, climate change, poverty were conspicuously absent in both presidents’ first-term speeches. So much ado about innovation On the campaign trail in 2019, Masisi promised improved education to prepare youths better to enter the labour market, a reduction in business bureaucracy and the digitisation of the economy. However, if the past SONAs are a guide, Masisi has not moved past the familiar rhetoric and posturing. Both Khama and Masisi have not paid much attention to innovation – in words and in deeds. Every November when they took to the podium to deliver the State of the Nation Address in Parliament, our speech analysis shows that they hardly mentioned the word innovation. In the first five years in office, the two mentioned the word 52 times. This is not to say that the country has not innovated completely. In 2021, the Global Innovation Index mentioned Botswana among 16 African countries that improved their global innovation position. However, a key difference between the two presidents is the use of the first-person reference: Khama has referred to himself more times than any collective word (we, our, us). Masisi, on the other hand, used ‘our’ and ‘we’ more times than ‘I’. How about corruption and unemployment? Botswana is in the grip of a deep economic malaise. While this is nothing new,it has reached breaking point. The number of unemployed graduates is at a peak while job creation remains a pressing issue for most politicians. This explains why politicians in government fudge the topic during the State of the Nation Address. Based on wordcount, President Masisi used the word ‘unemployment’ once in his SONA speeches between 2018 and 2022. While this is not to suggest that the President has not been trying to fight unemployment, the omission is telling. On the same issue, Khama did not do much better either. In an 8000-word SONA speech in 2008, Khama mentioned the word ‘unemployment’ twice: first acknowledging a mismatch between graduates’ skills and workplace demands, and then claiming that the government will henceforth commit to reducing unemployment. The word appeared once in his 2009 speech. One in every three youths is said to be unemployed in Botswana. One would have expected Masisi to move decisively to rebuild institutions of democracy which were all but destroyed during the Khama era but are now under new leadership. The worst affected were the intelligence service, the corruption watchdog, and the tax collector. Freedom House says contracts are still awarded through patronage networks while budget processes remain opaque. Like Khama, Masisi continues to use threats and lawfare to harass opponents and journalists are not free, according to the Democracy Research Project. It is therefore not surprising that the word ‘corruption’ has not been receiving much mention during the SONA speeches. Khama mentioned it only 43 times in his first five years in office. Masisi mentioned it 19 times when delivering SONA between 2018 and 2022. Methodology Reporting on this story relied on past State of the Nation Address speeches delivered by Presidents Masisi and Khama. However, we focused on their first terms to give it a fair comparative representation. To determine wordcount, we downloaded 10 PDF speeches 2008 – 2012 and 2018 - 2022 and turned them into text document and fed them into Pandas, a python library. To find the frequently used words, we used Natural Language Toolkit, a platform used for building Python programmes that work with human language data for applying in statistical natural language processing (NLP). In data visualisation, we used Datawrapper and Adobe Illustrator. *This article ws produced in partnership with Ink Centre for Investigative Journalism [/ihc-hide-content]

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State of the Usual: What Have Masisi And Khama Been Talking About?

A comparative analysis of SONA speeches by President Masisi and and former president Khama gives a glimpse of such long-held divergent views that it can be said to be a case of two men and two perspectives

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State of the Usual: What Have Masisi And Khama Been Talking About?

A comparative analysis of SONA speeches by President Masisi and and former president Khama gives a glimpse of such long-held divergent views that it can be said to be a case of two men and two perspectives

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