Thread by @LordElvo

#StolenPosts Part 1.

IS BOTSWNA CORRUPTION AS OLD AS THE BDP?

Professor Kenneth Good archieves....

"A document prepared/leaked by unknown NDB sources revealed that many of Botswana's leaders were heavily indebted to the Bank, some in default for over six months.

Among them, the
Assistant Minister of Finance, Edison Masisi, had himself acquired a loan of P42,000, as of September 1993, and the Minister of Mineral
Resources and Water Affairs, Archie Mogwe, had borrowed P26,000, of which P15,000 was more than six months in arrears.

The Minister of Presidential Affairs, Lieutenant-General Merafhe, owed P47,000, while his colleagues at Commerce and Industry, P.H.K.Kedikilwe, held a balance outstanding of P640,000, of which P260,000 was in arrears.

Johnny Swart, a prominent BDP backbencher from the Ghanzi district, owed as much as P1,120,000.
The Minister of Labour and Home Affairs, Patrick Balopi, was indebted via his companyPhuramarapo Investment P/L to the extent of P1,IOO00, with arrears of P400,000.

The NDB was also allegedly owed P546,000 by President Masire, P600,000 by Tshipinare, and P1.5 million by Sebego, with both ex-Minister being similarly lax in their repayments.

As well, the President's brother, Basimane Masire, figured
in the top 15 of the Bank's debtors near the end of 1993, with a loan outstanding of P12 million that had never been serviced.

Although the Minister of Finance had said in January 1992 that the
NDB was 'increasingly dependent on Government for its survival', several of its leading members seem to have been responsible for its decline and downfall.

They had borrowed heavily from this proclaimed 'pillar of our financial system', and had not bothered to repay their loans even as the Bank collapsed under the burden of its accumulated
debts.

This governing elite included those, as NDB employees plausibly claimed, who determined the interest rates charged on bank loans.

They also had sanctioned at least two generous debt write-offs in the 1980s, from which presumably some of them had personally gained,
thereby undoubtedly sending 'the wrong signals' to other borrowers, actual and potential.

Unnamed sources inside the NDB stated, in February I994, that Cabinet Ministers and other parliamentarians had repeatedly sought
loans for which they did not quality.

Indeed, the size of those later known to have remained outstanding and unserviced for over half a year says nothing for the strength and autonomy of the NDB Board.

The Minister of Finance had implied that creditworthiness had not been a requisite for all borrowers, and the Bank's new interim general
manager, John Rohan, admitted in an interview that some loans might have been approved through political influence."

#BafanaBa

When was @TsholetsaDomi never corrupt?

#StolenPost PART 2

HOW BDP SG AND CHAIRMAN WERE DROPPED FOR STEALING LAND AROUND GABORONE

Professor Kenneth Good continues...

"The Presidential Commission of Inquiry into illegal land transactions in peri-urban villages near Gaborone concluded its work in December
1991.

The Chairman, Englishman Kgabo, was explicit regarding the origins of an acute public problem which had steadily worsened over a decade.

People had moved to the Kweneng District, and more
particularly into Mogoditshane, because of the critical shortage of accommodation in Gaborone; and this was 'a serious indictment of Government itself since it failed to provide shelter to its people.'

The difficulties faced were indeed exacerbated by the relevant agencies operating under the purview of the Ministry of Local Government.

Land allocations had remained frozen in Mogoditshane since the mid-1980s, and the Botswana Housing Corporation had virtually suspended the construction of houses, while the servicing of plots had also slowed
down.

The Commission managed to identify as many as 84I plots that were illegally acquired, but felt that the actual figure was higher.

'It was a grave mistake' to suspend allocations for so long a time, Kgabo concluded, without any alternative being provided by the Government.

While many residents were well-nigh forced into unlawful land transactions, they were also encouraged to act illegally by the participation of certain parliamentarians and leading ministers in such activities.

The Commission found evidence of the use of high office for personal gain, and named the Vice-President and Minister for Local Government, P. S. Mmusi, and the Minister of Agriculture, D. K.
Kwelagobe.

The latter had claimed to have been given a parcel of landby a generous friend, but the Land Board had refused to give legal effect to this transfer:

'On appeal to the Minister [of Local Government] by Mr Kwelagobe the Land Board was directed to
effect the transfer'.

This intervention by the Minister on behalf of a friend and colleague was, said Kgabo, 'deeply regrettable'.

Both Mmusi & Kwelagobe were developing land in the area, & a plot had been transferred to the Vice-President's son & consolidated with adjacent land owned by a senior bureaucrat; both the transfer & the
consolidation 'were done during the freeze' on allocations by the Land Board

Residents informed the Commission that Mmusi had 'told them in the kgotla that the freeze affected non-Bakwena only'.

Several of those who were themselves engaged in illegal land sales claimed that they had done no wrong since ' responsible people accumulate large chunks of land and enrich themselves'.

In Mogoditshane, the name of Mmusi and Kwelagobe had 'cropped up very frequently' before the Commission, and 'the public does not refer to them with any compliments'.

Kgabo concluded that 'government credibility & integrity are at stake' in the peri-urban areas. Mmusi was also the National Chairman of the BDP, & Kwelagobe was its Secretary-General; respectively numbers two & three after President Ketumile Masire in the hierarchy of the BDP.

Although both resigned from the Government in March I992, three months after the submission of the report, they were most reluctant to admit the seriousness of their actions. Only in June I992 was their admit the seriousness of their actions.

Only in June I992 was their suspension announced."

#AncientCorruption

God bless Professor Good.

#StolenPost PART 3

BHC GENERAL MANAGER DIES MYSTERIOUSLY WITH CORRUPTION SECRETS IN HIS SAFE

VENSON MOITOI RESPONSIBLE FOR MASSIVE CORRUPTION

Professor Kenneth Good spills old beans...

"Operations of the Botswana Housing Corporation (BHC) The Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the operations of the BHC, chaired by Richard Christie, presented its report in November
1992,

amid existing public furore as events unfolded concerning that parastatal and its associated Ministry.

In the previous December, Spectra Botswana had granted an unsecured loan of P5oo,ooo to one of its three directors, the Assistant Minister of Local Government, Michael Tshipinare,

and thereafter its parent company, the Premier
Group of South Africa, made a successful tender-bid to construct a new headquarters for the BHC, at a planned allocation of P53 million.

In February I992 the Corporation's ambitious general manager, Joseph Letsholo, met a violent death. It was not entirely surprising, therefore when Christie identified 'gross mismanagement and dishonesty' in the BHC 'resulting in the loss of tens of millions of Pula'.

Inefficiencies and wrong-doing appeared throughout the Corporation, and existed too within the supervising Ministry. The other Assistant Minister of Local Government, Ronald Sebego, was found to have used his position for the benefit of friends.

The construction of 407 high-cost houses had been planned on a hillside at Lobatse, though
little or no market existed there for such accommodation, and the BHC had paid out P8-5 million for professional services in their design.

Spectra Botswana received PI2 million to build the new BHC headquarters before the contract was finally cancelled in June I992.

Christie found that 'ultimate administrative responsibility' was borne by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry who was also Chairman of the BHC, Pelonomi Venson, while Mmusi carried 'the political responsibility' for the massive corruption.

The subjects of the Kgabo and Christie reports were closely interrelated, and the identified problems stemmed from housing and land shortages which had been unreasonably prolonged by those in power.

Ministers and senior civil servants had manipulated the circumstances for personal advantage, and irresponsible, wrong
decisions had been taken.

Spending of P53 million on a redundant office-building for the BHC was without justification, & it was at least
questionable if the contract in any case should have gone to the Premier Group, whose operations in Africa, especially so in
Zaire, were surrounded by notoriety.

The Corporation, under the day-to-day control of a maverick manager, had acted out of public
control.

The IPM consultancy also resulted from the near total ineffectiveness of the supposed controls, and almost P30 million had been wasted, to the presumed private gain of some of those involved.

The events in Mogoditshane and the mismanagement in the BHC and the Ministry of Local Government, moreover, came to light through
public controversy - fuelled by able investigative reporting in the independent newspapers - and not as a result of internal, governmental mechanisms

These throughout were either absent or
ineffective.

Kgabo made clear the long-running nature of the problems he investigated, and much the same applied to the operations considered
by Christie.

As noted, leading politicians and bureaucrats were identified in both reports; Mmusi was particularly prominent, ranking next only to President Masire in both the Cabinet and the ruling BDP.

Sandy Grant examined the possibility that 'key members of the government knew very well what was happening but hoped somehow
to keep matters quiet.'

Chance events, like the death by car accident of the BHC's General Manager, made this impossible.

NB: People who believe @SirGMotswaledi was killed are not mad. Ask Sandy Grant.

When, as Grant noted, Joseph Letsholo's personal safe was opened, 'so many of the top people in government were sufficiently concerned about what was in [it] that they had all to be present'."

Rather as Kgabo seemed to suspect, the BHC scandals implied a failure in the entire government system especially in its high echelons".

#OnceCorruptAlwaysCorrupt

@TsholetsaDomi members ke kopa boroko le bojalwa ko Kang. Ba lo kgweetsang from Ngamiland I have a driver's licence but no money to go to the congress. RT for awareness. #ReaTlhopha2019

I am going to the congress just to pick brains of Batswana who scream ae jeke. 😂

Follow Onalenna Chabaya on Facebook to enjoy the best of Batswana's corruption history. 😤

#StolenPost PART 4

BDP MINISTER GETS FOUR MONTHS IMPRISONMENT FOR CORRUPTLY OBTAINING P500,000.00

TAXI DRIVER GETS 2 YEARS FOR STEALING A TAXI

Professor Kenneth Good again...

"Tom Nairn sees corruption as 'linked' to one-party dominance, as scandals in Japan under the Liberal Democrats and in Italy under the sway of the Christian Democrats have suggested.

Corruption and mismanagement are certainly likely to continue in Botswana unless all transgressors face effective punishment. Common criminality is sometimes severely dealt with.

In January I993, a self-employed taxi driver, found in possession of a stolen motor vehicle (which he was not alleged to have actually stolen), received four years imprisonment, with two years suspended, although it was his first offence.

By way of contrast, in July, Tshipinare was found guilty by the Chief Magistrate of corruptly obtaining a P5oo,ooo loan from Spectra Botswana and given an actual one year's jail sentence (four with three suspended)."

Not four months later he was completely free, having been found not guilty on appeal to the High Court. Justice K. Gyeke-Dako's reasoning threw strong light on the accepted business practices of Ministers.

He ruled that when Alex Goldman (managing director of Spectra) released the P5oo,ooo to Tshipinare, the former had 'already calculated' that since Spectra was going to make a profit of P4 million, 'the accused's share [would be] about P3 million when the contract was completed'.

The evidence showed that the Assistant Minister of Local Government urgently needed the new loan - he was 'hard-pressed ' in the sympathetic words of the Judge - in order to pay off his old loan of PI99,ooo to the NDB by I3 December I99I.

Gyeke-Dako determined that Spectra had 'a clear expectancy to deduct [the P5oo,ooo, plus interest] from [Tshipinare's] share of profits'.

Both Goldman and the Assistant Minister, he concluded, were engaged in nothing other than a perfectly normal business transaction.

Not only was the charge of influence-peddling unproven, but declared the Judge:

'Surely, the accused as a director [of Spectra], was entitled to promote the interests of his company, & stricto sensu, there should be nothing wrong in the accused, qua director, purposely going to JHB in August 1991 to join
the Spectra in conducting the BHC Management

(Cont) to inspect the handiwork of Spectra.

Although the Chief Magistrate earlier found that Tshipinare had failed to declare his business interests in Spectra to his supervisor, the President, for Gyeke-Dako this constituted a mere 'breach of administrative instruction', irrelevant to the appeal.

In other words, it was acceptable that a heavily indebted Assistant Minister should acquire PI 3 million through the award of a government contract, from within his own Ministry, to the parent organisation of a company he owns

and a taxi driver gets 4 years, serves two with two years suspended, although it was his first offence." 😂

#StolenPost PART 5

HOW BDP BIG GUNS DECLARED THEMSELVES AS POVERTY STRIKEN TO ROB A POOR MAN'S FUND

Professor Kenneth Good series...

The fate of the Small Borrowers Fund (SBF), with outstanding loans of P32 million, as already noted, was further indicative of prevailing practices among the ruling elite.

The Fund, according to Mogae at a
press conference in January 1994, had been grossly misunderstood: 'It should have been called small loans fund not the SBF since there is nothing small about those who utilise it'.

The Fund had originally been intended for the poor, but in the absence of any clear-cut policy as to who exactly should be regarded as small borrowers, most of those who made use of the facility were actually, he reportedly said, 'big guns'.

Both the Bank and the Fund had been exploited, extensively and over many years, by those who were responsible for the good operations of these crucial sources of finance.

The governing elite's manifest ethos was individual self-enrichment.

During the budget debate in I992,
when the MP for Kgalagadi, Lesedi Mothibamele, called on parliamentarians and top officials to settle their NDB debts, he was reportedly heckled, and some members demanded to know 'who has
shown you our accounts?'

It was specifically from the spectacle of greed & negligence among the leadership that the 'wrong signals' had emanated & these undoubtedly indicated that close associates of the elite might also be the beneficiaries of debt cancellations & other inequitable policies & procedures

While Ministers were able to maintain unpaid debts for long periods, other borrowers were treated quite differently - the owner of a small cement-block manufacturing business being threatened with foreclosure by the Bank when his debt stood at just P166.44.

#StolenPost PART 6

129 STAFF JOB CUTS AS MP'S AND MINISTERS FUME OVER BEING EXPOSED

1 BILLION PULA LOST TO CORRUPTION ANNUALLY: LOT MOROKA

UB STUDENTS MARCH AGAINST CORRUPTION 1994

Honourable Bae was only 5 years old by then.

Professor Kenneth Good series ends. 😎

"The immediate response of several Minister was to assert that their large loans and indebtedness were actually all the fault of the NDB.

Sebego said that 'my arrears [of P730, 000] are not that high. They are probably half that figure written on the [debtors] list'Merafhe claimed that 'it is just that accounts at NDB are in a mess'.

Although this might have been wholly or partially true by early 1994, it ignored the related question of ministerial responsibility in the making of the mess in the first place.

His colleague, Mogwe, nevertheless agreed, explaining that 'The thing is the NDB never reminds us to pay and we forget.' He also suggested that his debts were only normal, adding disarmingly, 'We are human too.'

President Masire reportedly paid
the Bank what was outstanding on his debt shortly before saying that 'I had a problem like all farmers of sometimes being in arrears. '

The effectiveness of this Everyman argument suffered from the patent fact that by no means all farmers, for example, enjoyed any such access to NDB funds.

It might be normal to want a loan, but it was decidedly abnormal to receive one of hundreds of thousands of Pula and not be obliged to repay.

A third reaction was to criticise the exposure, and to attack those who sought to investigate the role of the ruling elite in the NDB's collapse. President Masire declared that it was all 'unethical', and that 'the media should refrain from this witch hunt'."

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, also attacked the press, claiming: 'We are breeding ... a culture of mistrust and abuse where you bundle everyone into one group without verifying the facts'

Notably, however, no serious rebuttal or revision of the released figures was forthcoming throughout the considerablecommotion that extended for
some weeks.

Newspapers added to the sensationalism by alleging that the collective debt of BDP Ministers and MPs to the NDB was P30 million.

52 University students and other concerned citizens held two lively protest demonstrations in Gaborone, but the governing elite wa was not pressed for further information.

While the leadership concentrated on a few inadequate counter-arguments, what they conspicuously did not offer to the public was a detailed explanation of either the extent of their loans & accumulated indebtedness, or the circumstances in which they were acquired &
maintained.

For example: who had initially authorised the loans and on what basis and collateral? who had approved the cancellations of
various debts, and had the Ministers themselves been beneficiaries? how had many remained in arrears on repayments for so long, and on whose authority?

Although unethical behaviour was alluded to by more than one Minister, their accountability on this crucial matter remained entirely absent. No resignations resulted.

Instead, it was certain subordinate though participant elements in the problem who have implicitly, in the context of the time, borne the
responsibility; at least 129 of those working for the NDB, some 50 per cent of the Bank's staff, were declared to be redundant in Jan 1994.

When angry students demonstrated outside the House of Assembly the following month, they said that 'because of the failure of the Members of Parliament and Ministers to pay the NDB its money, innocent workers are having to pay by losing their jobs '.

It remained possible that not even full repayment of debts might be required of the
leadership, but although the Minister of Finance was again being criticised by some government MPs for not writing off more NDB loans,

Mogae had publicly listed reasons during his press conference in January why any further cancellations would be unfair.

For its part, the Bank's new management did not aim at the full recovery of all debts.

Rohan's position in February I994 was described as being one of optimism for the recovery of either some, or a substantial amount, of the millions of Pula owed to the NDB, and this over an unspecified
period.