Mogae joins Rawlings in house woes

GABORONE, Thursday

Former Ghanaian president Jerry Rawlings is not the only retired African head of state having sleepless nights over housing woes.

In diamond-rich Botswana, ex-president Festus Mogae also has a different housing problem.

Mr Mogae has publicly expressed his frustrations about the sorry state of his retirement home and office. He is thoroughly annoyed by the fact that he no longer has privacy as technicians have been moving in and out of his bedroom with increasing frequency.

Mr Mogae’s luxurious multi-million retirement residence was completed in 2007 before he handed over power to his then vice-president, Ian Khama, but the former president is annoyed by its disrepair.

In a recent newspaper interview, he poured out his frustrations at the repeated failure by government engineers and technicians to fix defects at the property in the upmarket Phakalane suburb of the capital Gaborone.

The former president was found in a furious state by a journalist just after a team of electricians had left the residence without fixing electric faults. They had given the excuse that the walls were too high.

“How can they say that? How can an electrician say the walls are too high for him to fix a problem? They have been coming here many times and I no longer have any privacy because they have even been in my bedroom for more than three times already,” the former president fumed to Mmegi newspaper.

“I want their names and workplaces so that I can report them,” he added to his assistants who were trying very hard to assure him that the faults would be repaired.

“This is supposed to be a state-of-the-art house, the water is being wasted because all the sprinklers are leaking. The security lights are supposed to switch on when it is dark but they are not. Some of them just go on for the whole day and cannot be switched off,” he said.

He added that the faults have been reported for the past three months but technicians keep coming to the residents and going back without fixing anything.

“It is not only one who come but three every time. They go back and claim that they were busy here,” he said.

His private secretary Mr Bapasi Mphusu, a former journalist agrees. “The place becomes very cold in winter and very hot in summer,” he said.

Mr Mphusu stated that the general maintenance of the property is almost zero despite repeated reports and appeals for assistance to the desk officer at Office of the President.

“Different teams are often sent here to repair but nothing happens. Defects and problems are not solved,” he said.