Quett Masire
Quett Masire was president of Botswana from 1980 to 1998, the co-founder with Seretse Khama of the Democratic Party and the vice-president and finance minister of fourteen years who took over when Khama died. He governed eighteen years of the fastest growth in the world. The diamonds of Jwaneng, opened in 1982, and Orapa were sold through the fifty-fifty company with De Beers whose terms he had negotiated. The money was put into roads, schools, clinics, the reserves and a stabilisation fund rather than into the pockets of the government. A country that had been among the poorest in the world at independence, with twelve kilometres of tarred road and twenty-two university graduates, was by his retirement a middle-income democracy with the highest rating in Africa from every agency that rated, elections every five years that the same party won. There was the drought of the 1980s met with a relief programme that fed the country without a famine, which the economists still cite. The cost of the position on the front line was the South African raids on Gaborone in 1985 and 1988 that killed refugees and Botswanans, which he answered by keeping the ANC's people out of uniform and the country out of the war. He was born in Kanye in 1925, a Ngwaketse, was a teacher and a journalist, founded the party's newspaper, and farmed cattle. He drafted with Khama the party's programme of 1962 that won the first election in 1965. He was deputy prime minister at independence in 1966 and the man who wrote the development plans. The second decade was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic that would infect a third of the adults, the constitutional changes that gave the vote at eighteen and limited the presidency to ten years, the housing scandal of 1992 that cost him his vice-president, and the retirement he chose in March 1998 at seventy-two, handing over to Mogae under the rule he had written, which no African president had done in that way. He mediated in the Congo's dialogue of 2001-02 as the OAU's facilitator, and chaired the panel on the Rwandan genocide that reported in 2000. He died in Gaborone in June 2017 at ninety-one. The country called him Rra Gaone, and the university's library carries the name.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 2017 CE
- Nationality: Botswanan
- Roles: president, politician
