There has been much criticism of impotence on the part of our parliament, accompanied by a general lack of grasp of even the most elementary principles of governance among our Members of Parliament.
Much of this criticism has been justified.
We would, however, like to congratulate Parliament for its commitment to get past its bad name of the past.
It is the role of parliament to hold cabinet accountable and ensure that all public money, in whatever form, is well spent and utilized.
It is hard to believe that most of what has been happening at Botswana Development Corporation over the last five years or so could in anyway qualify to be in the nation’s best interest.
But then, in the past, parliament would have had no business deciding what goes on at BDC.
Cabinet, especially the Minister of Finance, would choose to hide the rot behind pretence that BDC is an independent even private company, whatever that meant, and that, therefore, its affairs are not the business of Members of Parliament.
Thankfully that era has now come to an end. And, as a country, we have every right to celebrate and encourage our parliament to do more of what we have seen them do at BDC and pray that the same medicine will henceforth be administered to other state owned companies.
This is because when these companies run into trouble as BDC did just under fifteen years ago, it was parliament that was called on to come running with a lifeboat by way of injecting equity money to keep the now dysfunctional behemoth afloat.
Although they like to pretend they are a commercial business, BDC has been able to participate in some of its crazy projects because it enjoys generous patronage from the Ministry of Finance, which uses government money to underwrite and reward the corporation’s incompetence.
This government patronage, which is totally unaccounted for, has bred a false impression that BDC is a well-managed company.
It is not. And it has not been for quite a while.
The corporation is able to get away with it because financiers are well aware that with guarantees underwritten by Botswana government, their money is safe, no matter how badly BDC projects perform.
For their part, BDC executives are well aware that for as long as they enjoy protection and patronage from the Ministry of Finance, the corporation will always be propped up with public money, no matter how much money they lose. And that has, from beginning to the end, been the story of the tragedy that is the Glass Manufacturing Plant at Palapye.
The public is right to be enraged by the turn of events at BDC.
All evidence goes a long way to prove why BDC executives are behaving the way they have been doing.
They are the only people we are aware of who are accorded public money to insulate themselves from the economics of the real world.
But even more annoying has been physical protection that the Minister of Finance, Ken Matambo, has been giving the BDC executives.
More than once the Minister has intervened to block a process that would have seen a number of BDC executives sacked.
At one point, he even sacrificed a whole army of Board of Directors if only to keep the BDC fairytale alive.
With the Board all but browbeaten by the minister, there has been nobody to keep check on the excesses, incompetence, inadequacies and inefficiencies of the BDC management.
Clearly, BDC is not an ordinary, normal company.
Or, at the very least, the managers would long have been sacked and the company restructured.
But that cannot happen at BDC.
As things are, BDC has a political master who is himself an immediate past Managing Director of the corporation.
The same minister, it turns out, also sat on a panel that effectively decided on who his successor was going to be when he left BDC. The successor, we now learn from the parliamentary investigating team, was not the most qualified of the applicants.
Events at BDC border on the criminal. The corporation has become a glaring example of wasted opportunity.
These are, however, not unconnected with the overall failures that are so widespread at the country’s top leadership.
It is not uncommon these days to see President Ian Khama protecting and defending a cabinet minister for actions that are, in the public view, as indefensible as they are unpardonable.
Other than President Khama, his finance minister and, of course, the executives that have run down BDC, there is barely a man, woman or child in this country who does not think BDC is very much a victim of political indecisiveness.