The drama has been going on for simply too long at the Botswana Meat Commission.
Bad management, greed, poor leadership, chicanery, trickery and, in some instances, outright corruption are just some of the root causes of all the problems currently bedevilling the Commission.
BMC red lights have been beeping as early as the Commission was delisted from supplying the European market on account of a failure to meet the high standards of health and hygiene as set by the Europeans.
To make matters worse, there has been a failure on the part of authorities, especially at cabinet level, to provide decisive leadership to rescue BMC.
The thinking, it would seem, was that things would eventually sort themselves out.
But, as it turned out, the situation at BMC moved from bad to worse.
And from the look of things, we have not yet reached rock bottom.
Twice the Government has had to intervene.
Board members and, most recently, two Chief Executives have had to be shown the door.
Government can sack as many people as possible, but things will at least not on their own go back to normal.
What is needed is a clear deliverable strategy by the shareholder to dig the Commission out of the abyss.
Pumping money into it, with the hope that things will somehow correct themselves is nothing but foolhardy.
While the BMC leadership cutting across all levels, including political, board and indeed management should be squarely blamed for all the charade, it is also our opinion that farmers, especially the large scale commercial ones who over the years had developed an entrenched entitlement mentality should not be spared. These are a select group who account for no more than 20 percent of BMC’s throughput.
While numerically very small, this small clique is organizationally very solid and very tribalistic in outlook.
Mainly centered around the Ghanzi farms bloc, they are very wealthy and have deliberately kept to themselves, doing nothing to empower those around them including inside their own farms, much less empowering the other farmers around the country.
Wielding a very powerful financial power, this tribe has been literally nagging government calling for a detachment from the mainstream in a manner that would elsewhere be classified as secessionist in both ambition and outlook.
Instead of working through the established channels to improve the whole industry, they have over the recent past devised all sorts of tricks to disempower and ultimately shunt out a majority of suppliers.
To them it does not seem to have mattered even in the process their ambitions would lead to the collapse of BMC as is currently happening right before our eyes.
These are powerful and vested interests so well organised that they have even gone as far as to infiltrate BMC management as a way of establishing ways to better manipulate decisions in their favour.
Some of the most bizarre decisions at BMC, which led to the orgy of recent mistakes, clearly did not have the interests of the Commission at heart.
While the majority of suppliers were in the cold after BMC was delisted from the European market for failing to uphold the standards, this small clique continued to milk the Commission because, as contract suppliers, they continued to receive money to feed the animals that had accrued in their feedlots.
As it turns out, this minority clique also doubles as transporters for BMC.
We advise this group of farmers, a good number of whom are innately loyal, patriotic and faithful to Botswana to work at becoming more inclusive if they are to avoid evoking and stoking feelings of resentment among indigenous farmers who are already feeling short-changed by the ungodly relationship that these mainly white farmers have with some in our Government.
In fact, a short conversation with indigenous farmers unveils deep feelings of envy and hatred.
That is not good, not for BMC, not for government, not for either set of farmers and certainly not for the country.
Botswana Government has already lost P300 million in its bid to salvage BMC from the ongoing troubles.
Unless the situation at BMC changes, government will continue to lose more, and God forbid, BMC will in a not so distant future be itself headed for the knackers.
The whole of this week, the media has been awash with stories of how Permanent Secretary to the President, Eric Molale, is intervening to save BMC from itself.
On this matter, we find ourselves on the side of Eric Molale, a thing that we must concede does not happen so often as our differences with his leadership styles are well documented.
We have never been comfortable with a situation where a Board Chairman had volunteered to become a CEO. We do not know how BMC Board, the minister of agriculture, the PSP and indeed all government allowed such a bizarre development in the first instance.
However well meaning an individual, it cannot be right that they are allowed to do an important work such as that of turning an ailing BMC on a voluntary basis and without clear accountability structures.
And yet that is what happened at BMC.
Just as we had feared, the experiment has produced disastrous results.
And we would not be surprised if instead of a salary the Acting CEO was using the position to place his interests or those of his commercial friends on a pedestal to deliver BMC as readymade.
