–A Personal Tribute
By James Woods*
Every time I have visited Botswana, I have been struck by the same thing. The country feels looked after. Not in the way that aid money looks after a country, from the outside in, but in the way that genuine governance does, from the inside out. Roads that were built and maintained. Institutions that function. A population that carries itself with a quiet dignity that comes from not having been systematically betrayed. That feeling does not happen by accident. It is the accumulated consequence of leaders who understood that power is held in trust, not in possession. President Festus Mogae, who died on 8th May, 2026, at the age of 86, was one of those leaders. So was Sir Ketumile Masire, who left us in June 2017 aged 91. Between them, they governed Botswana for 28 years and left it a different country from the one they found.
I write this as a Malawian, and I write it with the weight of someone who had the honour of knowing both men. My connection to each ran through two threads. The first was my time at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, where the question of what genuine African leadership looks like was not abstract but urgent and daily. The second was the deep and close friendship both men shared with former President Bakili Muluzi of Malawi, who has been one of the greatest mentors and guiding presences in my life. That bond of friendship gave my encounters with President Mogae and Sir Ketumile a human warmth that formal introductions rarely produce, and it grounded everything I understood about both men in something more personal than biography.
My first encounter with President Mogae came at a Mo Ibrahim Foundation gathering I will not easily forget. In that room sat my former boss Mo Ibrahim himself, the late Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the UN, Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, Salim Ahmed Salim, former Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity, former President Pedro Pires of Cape Verde, Bill Gates, Nicolas Berggruen, philanthropist and founder of the Berggruen Institute, and a constellation of African leaders, statesmen, and global figures whose collective presence made clear what was genuinely at stake in the conversation about African governance and development. Over the years that followed, I was privileged to share space with many remarkable people through the work of the Foundation and through the my personal ties across the globe. President Mogae moved through all of it with a quiet authority that needed no announcement. He listened more than he spoke. When he spoke, the room listened.
The last time I saw him was in Botswana, some years ago. He was the same man he had always been. Measured, warm, and still deeply engaged with the questions that had defined his presidency. That consistency, the absence of any gap between the public figure and the private man, is rarer than it should be.
Sir Ketumile is the one I knew more closely, and the memory of him is specific in the way that only real relationships are. Every time we spoke, he made his way to Malawi. Stories about the land, about the people, about the bonds he had nurtured across southern Africa over a lifetime of continental engagement. He had a genuine affection for our country, rooted in real friendship and real history, not the performed solidarity of summits and communiqués. Those conversations remain with me as some of the most generous I have had with any public figure. He was, in every sense, exactly who his legacy says he was.
Sir Ketumile became Botswana’s second president in 1980. He had already served fourteen years as Finance Minister, co-founded the Botswana Democratic Party alongside Seretse Khama, and made the defining economic decision of his country’s modern history. When diamonds were discovered in Botswana’s soil after independence, Sir Ketumile decided the revenues belonged to the future rather than the present. He wrote later that as a farmer he had always understood the importance of keeping something back for a dry day. He governed by that exact principle. In the early years of his presidency, Botswana endured a seven-year drought, its longest on record. Not a single person died of famine. He launched relief programmes that fed communities while building infrastructure, kept children in school by making food the reward for attendance, and held the country together with the same steady hands that had managed its finances for over a decade. In 1998, after eighteen years in office, he stepped down voluntarily and handed power to his Vice President. That Vice President was Mogae.
President Mogae served two full constitutional terms and made one decision that defined his presidency above all others. When HIV/AIDS threatened to hollow Botswana out from within, at a moment when the country had one of the highest infection rates on earth, he did not manage the crisis politically. He confronted it medically. In 2002 his government launched free antiretroviral treatment at public health facilities, making Botswana the first country in Africa to provide its citizens with free ARV therapy. He was an Oxford-educated economist who understood the fiscal argument against that commitment. He weighed it against the human argument and chose his people without hesitation. The lives saved by that decision are beyond precise counting.
In November 2008, months after leaving office, President Mogae received the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership at a ceremony at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria. Kofi Annan, presenting the award, said that President Mogae’s leadership had ensured Botswana’s continued stability and prosperity in the face of a pandemic that had threatened the future of his country and his people. At the Mo Ibrahim Foundation we understood what those words cost to earn. The prize is not awarded out of generosity. It is awarded out of recognition, and it is withheld in every year that no leader meets the standard. President Mogae met it without ambiguity.
What these two men gave Botswana, and by extension what they gave the continent, was proof. Proof that a country beginning from poverty can govern its way to prosperity. Proof that mineral wealth does not have to become a curse. Proof that constitutional limits are not an imposition but a gift, one that protects institutions and peoples from the corrosion of unchecked power. Botswana has never experienced a coup in sixty years of independence. It has transferred executive power peacefully, voluntarily, and constitutionally each time it was required. Sir Ketumile to President Mogae. President Mogae to Ian Khama. Each handover conducted as if it were the most natural thing in the world. On this continent, it is not always the most natural thing. It is a choice, and it requires the kind of leaders these two men were.
I have sat in rooms with both of them. I have visited their country and felt what they built in the texture of daily life. I have heard Sir Ketumile speak about Malawi with the affection of a man who understood that the fates of African nations are bound together. I have seen in President Mogae the quiet authority of someone who had given his country everything he had and carried no regrets about any of it.
Africa does not produce leaders like this in surplus. When it loses them, the loss is felt beyond borders, beyond generations, beyond the formal language of condolence.
Rest well, President Mogae. You kept your word.
And Sir Ketumile, the soil you loved to speak about is richer for every conversation you had in it.
*James Woods is a governance and strategic communications professional with roots in Malawi. He served as a Senior Diplomat at the Mission of Malawi to the European Union and is a former senior staffer at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. He holds an Executive MBA from the University of Oxford and a Master’s from the London School of Economics. He is an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow.
