Maun lawyer Lawrence Lecha, who is also the Chairman of Botswana Law Society, has parried accusations that he tried to fleece a Maun family of their plot in the lucrative Maun mall.
The accusations have been made by one Baaki Wazile, the eldest daughter in Wazile family, who alleges that the lawyer had taken advantage of her mother’s illiteracy and deliberately excluded children in the negotiations to get the plot in the mall for a one-room house in Moeti ward on the outskirts of Maun.
Lecha, according to Baaki, did this in a bid to extend his supermarket business which lies just metres from the Wazile’s family yard by building a bar in their plot.
“What he did was a plan to disinherit us of the yard my mother has worked so hard for just because we are from a poor back ground,” she said.
Asked if she did not protest when people she did not know came and started constructing a one room-house in their Moeti ward yard, Baaki said that she had asked the builders who they were and why they were building the house in the yard without their knowledge but that they just continued building saying they have been sent by “a lawyer” to construct the one-room house.
After the construction had ended, Baaki said it was when she for the first time saw Lecha asking them to move out of their hut in Maun mall and go to Moeti ward.
“I was very surprised by this. I did not know the man in the first place,” she said.
Asked to comment on the matter, Lecha confirmed the issue saying that she had negotiated with Baaki’s mother who even approved the construction of the one-room house in Moeti ward.
On whether he saw it fit to negotiate with the old woman alone excluding his children, he said that there was one young woman who had identified herself as the old woman’s daughter during the negotiations.
“I am a lawyer there is no way I could have done anything which is against the law,” he said.
Asked if he was still pursuing the issue, Lecha said all he wanted was to be paid back what he had spent in constructing the room in Moeti.
“As soon as I am paid the matter will end,” he said.
