During his ten years at Botswana Development Corporation, Ken Matambo made a splendid job of ensuring that women rose to key positions of authority in that corporation.
Today, almost all of BDC senior executive management is made up of women.
In a day and era where the corporate sector continues to spurn and marginalize women we cannot ask for more from Matambo.
Early this week, it was reported that the Finance Minister had sacked some Board members of the Botswana Development Corporation. At least one had been demoted.
It was a brazenly audacious coup staged a day before the BDC Managing Director (a woman) was scheduled to face a disciplinary hearing following results of an audit report that basically uncovered a cesspool of corruption at the corporation.
The sacking of board members by Minister Matambo has got the whole country talking.
Some of the sacked Board members had only a few months left before their contracts at BDC expired.
To many people, Ken Matambo is a career public servant who lives a tidy, well ordered life dedicated to service, honesty and professionalism.
But a greater number of people is beginning to ask just why he is treating the BDC executive differently?
Why does he want to cushion them from facing the music for allegations of wrongdoing at the Corporation?
To put everything into context, Matambo was until about two years ago a long serving Managing Director at BDC. He is himself currently facing legal difficulties related to his stay at BDC. But I digress.
There have been assertions that on behalf of Government, the Minister is concerned about the future of a glass plant at Palapye, which by the way is at the centre of the standoff between the BDC board and the executive management.
Concern has also been raised that had the minister not acted there was a real chance that BDC could collapse as a result of creditors running on it out of concern for their exposure and the corporation’s long term viability.
From where I stand, the minister did not have to sack board members for the plant at Palapye to continue.
More crucially, he also did not have to demote a board member who also happens to be his permanent secretary to drive home the message that it was him [Matambo] who was in charge.
All that the minister needed to do was reiterate his position on behalf of the shareholder, that notwithstanding all allegations of corruption it was utterly important to the Government of Botswana that the glass plant continued. And his word would have been obeyed.
The Minister is on record accusing the Board of managing BDC through the media.
If he is correct, then the Board was wrong to do so.
But still he did not have to sack them on the eve of watershed disciplinary hearings meant to bring sanity at BDC.
The tragedy of the minister’s actions is that by sacking the board a day before they held disciplinary procedures against management he is behaving like he is condoning or even covering up alleged acts of impunity at BDC. He has behaved like someone quite happy, if not prepared to take the bullet for BDC management.
Inadvertently or not, minister Matambo’s actions portray him as BDC godfather, in the process sending a totally unfortunate message to the effect that for as long as he is the Minister of Finance those that he groomed and left behind at BDC will remain untouchable.
It may well be that the minister sacked the Board for the larger interest of the corporation and the country.
But this is an assertion that is much more difficult to sell.
Skeptics (and there are many) are of the view that even in politics, minister Matambo has remained too close to BDC.
They say his actions portray him more like a supreme leader than a detached politician whose only concern should be as a shareholder rather than a micro-manager.
Matambo’s refusal to even acknowledge there could be a problem at BDC can only lead directly to suspicions (false or correct) that owing to his past association with them, he was willing to take the bullet for his many prot├®g├®s that he left behind at BDC.
While his presentation in parliament flies in complete defiance of independent audit results commissioned by the BDC board, it is my opinion that the minister is not being deliberately untruthful to parliament.
My guess is that he has never really been able to outgrow BDC. He may have left the place physically, but emotionally he stayed behind.
While he is now supposed to be a politician, he strikes me as somebody who is as spiteful of the political world as he is detached from it. His actions prove that he has remained an economist whose world rotates around BDC.
He would thus not assist the Board to undo what he perceives as his outstanding legacy at the Corporation, which includes appointing women to key positions.
While he now exists at another level, he still sees BDC failure as his failure, not least because almost all of the executives at the corporation directly owe it to him that which they are today.
This can be the only reason to understand why minister Matambo operates by trashing anybody who dares to question the sanctity of BDC.
Members of Cabinet, including President Ian Khama, consistently talk of the need to reclaim public trust in politics. I do not think minister Matambo’s action to sack a Board that was about to institute disciplinary hearings against some of his prot├®g├®s accused of corruption at BDC helps the cause.
No wonder some people are beginning to suspect that his action was so outrageous that he perhaps knows more than we have been made to believe.
The onus is now on DCEC to take the BDC case and run with it.
Putting hope on the new board would be like hoping against hope.
