There is ample circumstantial evidence that cabinet ministers and senior civil servants use inside information to position themselves, their friends, their relatives and their companies to benefit ahead of everyone elsewhere.
They use their access to information to position themselves not only to gain unfair competition but to also stave off possible competition.
That is called insider trading and in many countries it is explicitly illegal and punishable by law.
Not so in Botswana.
As Batswana, we all know how ministers and their senior officials are always ahead in planning to benefit from one planned government development initiative or another.
We all know how ministers use the knowledge gained from their interactions with government business to bend the paths and courses of development.
We know how retiring senior officials use inside information to better prepare themselves for greener pastures once they are out of service.
The reason why many retiring senior government officials always get plum positions in the private sector immediately upon retirement is almost always a result of the fact that during their active service such officials used their power to unfairly favour these companies against others.
A way has to be found to bring this to an end.
The best way to think of it would be to come up with a code under which retiring officials are subjected to a cooling off period during which they can not join any employment (fulltime or part time) that is related to their previous work.
By so doing, there will be no benefits for active members of the public service to favour other companies over others in return for the lure of potential employment upon retirement.
It is disgusting, to say the least, to see a public official who retired only a few months or weeks back, immediately joining a private company which, in one form or another, was a service provider or supplier of the ministry, department or parastatal the official was leading.
In other countries, there is what is called the mandatory cooling off period during which time a former public servant cannot join active employment of a private company in whatever form.
While that has its own disadvantages, the biggest benefit to be gained is that it is a deterrent against corruption and any form of kickbacks.
We call on the Institute of Directors to make proposals to government on how this issue and other related ones could be addressed.
BOCCIM and DCEC also have a vested interest in this matter.
They can work together to devise means that would in the end fight corruption.
As we all know official corruption in Botswana is on the march.
It can only get worse if now we allow people to use inside information to position themselves, a situation that is not helped by the fact that Botswana Government has consistently refused to come up with a law that makes it mandatory for public officers to declare their interests.
There are reports that once they were privy to the information that government was going to introduce a programme of ploughing fields for free, a number of ministers went on to purchase about 6 tractors each.
That, of course, was based on the inside knowledge not only of the impending programme, but also that there would be a shortage of tractors.
That is evil and kills the little trust the public may still be having in the politicians.
