Festus Mogae
Festus Mogae was president of Botswana from 1998 to 2008, the Oxford economist and central bank governor who had been Masire's finance minister and vice-president and who took the office on Masire's retirement. He won the elections of 1999 and 2004, and governed ten years whose subject was AIDS. With a third of the adults infected and the life expectancy fallen from sixty-five to thirty-nine, he said in 2001 that the country faced extinction. He took an HIV test on television. He made Botswana in 2002 the first African country to give antiretroviral drugs free to everyone who needed them, through the Masa programme with the Gates foundation and Merck, which by 2008 was treating a hundred thousand people and had cut the mother-to-child transmission from forty per cent to four, and which the rest of the continent then copied. The other subjects were the diamonds, the renegotiation with De Beers in 2006 that brought the sorting and cutting to Gaborone, and the growth that continued. There was the relocation of the San from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve that the high court found unlawful in 2006 and that Survival International made his reputation abroad, and the Zimbabwean refugees and the fence on the border. There was the succession, which he arranged by making Seretse Khama's son Ian his vice-president in 1998 and handing over to him in April 2008 a year before the election, under the ten-year rule. He was born in Serowe in 1939, studied economics at Oxford and Sussex, worked at the IMF in Washington, was permanent secretary to the president and governor of the Bank of Botswana. He was brought into politics by Masire as finance minister in 1989. He was given the Mo Ibrahim prize for African leadership in 2008, five million dollars for having left office well, and the French Legion of Honour. He has since chaired the joint monitoring commission of South Sudan's peace agreement, from 2015 to 2018, and spoken against the homosexuality laws his own country decriminalised in 2019, saying that he had been wrong to keep them. He has also said, of the successor he chose, that he had made a mistake, which Ian Khama's decade tested and the party's split of 2019 confirmed.
- Lived: 1939 CE – ?
- Nationality: Botswanan
- Roles: president, economist, politician
