The recent interrogation of the head of intelligence services by the corruption busting agency, the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) has once again brought to the fore questions on the ever shifting allegiances and friendships within President Ian Khama’s inner circle.
As the Director General of Intelligence Services, Isaac Kgosi is known to be the closest person to the president, eclipsing even the key ministers of state.
Under the Intelligence Services Act, Kgosi reports directly to the president every day. The two are known to sometimes meet twice daily on official business.
But when news broke out last week that Kgosi had been summoned to the DCEC head office, many questions were left unanswered.
Other than just what it is that DCEC would want to learn from such a key presidential apparatchik, questions are coming up on just how strong the alliance between him (Kgosi) and President Khama remains.
A strong suspicion is that DCEC would not have had the guts to interrogate such a powerful security detail without the explicit authority of President Khama himself, which leads to yet another suspicion of a fallout between Khama and his longtime prot├®g├®.
There is also another school, sympathetic to Kgosi, that he is a victim of rapacious business interests by ministers who accuse him of not using the DIS honey pot to procure from their businesses.
DIS is one of the largest recipients of the government development budget.
Other than the state of the relationship between Kgosi and Khama, new questions are beginning to surface about the relationship between Kgosi on the one hand and his immediate supervisor, Minister of Defence, Justice and Security, Ndelu Seretse, on the other.
Sources close to intelligence services point to an increasing rift between Seretse and Kgosi.
This also begs the question of just on whose side President Khama will ultimately fall, given that Ndelu Seretse is not just an insider but also a key cog of President Khama’s succession plan, a close blood cousin who was reappointed back to cabinet hardly a day after he had been acquitted of corruption charges that were related to government procurement.
Sunday Standard investigations have revealed that other than the suitability of some operatives he has hired at DIS, Kgosi was also questioned on the P105 million project that will see the computerization of the security of all government offices under an ambitiously financed project called e-government.
E-government is coordinated by the Permanent Secretary to the President, Eric Molale and Mrs Festinah Bakwena, who has recently been appointed Ombudsman.
There are also allegations that DIS is fraught with divisions and rivalries as is President Khama’s inner circle of which both Seretse and Kgosi are key members together with a few in the construction industry.
While DIS has been accused of trying to destroy evidence, sources known to be sympathetic to Kgosi say what is said to be files containing classified evidence were actually some old 8000 files that DIS found when they inherited their offices at the former Radio Botswana offices.
