The board of a Botswana Railways subsidiary has performed a magic trick that the Chief Executive Officer of the parent company is not too happy about.
After an unsuccessful recruitment exercise, three candidates were headhunted for the position of Managing Director of Gaborone Container Terminal, a subsidiary of BR. Oddly though, minutes of a Gabcon Board meeting held on November mention only two candidates: Lesedi Moakofhi and Luvuyo Hobo. However, it has emerged that there was a third candidate whose existence is not even mentioned in the documents. Getting wind of the latter, the BR CEO, Dominic Ntwaagae enquired from the Chairperson of the Gabcon Board, Legodile Serema, about this candidate.
“On Friday November 18, 2016, I received information to the effect that there was actually a third candidate who was assessed, but whose results were, for some unknown reason, neither included in nor mentioned in the Board pack. I therefore write to request that you kindly follow up on this point and possibly inquire from the external consultant who carried out the psychometric assessment and/or from the Gabcon [Board] Human Resources Committee. To my mind, this issue warrants the necessary due attention and consideration since it may, if proven to be true, have a serious effect on the very legitimacy of the current state of matters as regards the recruitment of the Managing Director for Gabcon,” Ntwaagae’s letter says.
At this point, it is unclear what the response was but everything about the recruitment process suggests that it was designed with a particular outcome in the minds of those who superintended it. The magic trick performed by the Gabcon Board ÔÇô causing the file of the third candidate to disappear – appears to have been done for the express purpose of ensuring such outcome. The Board, which had earlier rejected the three candidates because they had “developmental needs”, ended up appointing Moakofhi whom the psychometric assessment showed has developmental needs.
Independently, Sunday Standard has established that the third candidate was a former CEO of a parastatal organisation whom a professional colleague says is a highly competent “star performer”. The powers-that-be are said to suspect that he is aligned to the political opposition which is the reason they removed him from the post he held previously.
