By any account, the Office of the President (OP) should be the epitome and the embodiment of good corporate governance because it has all the requisite tools to achieve it. It is endowed with all the possible requisite tools particularly the human capital in all forms or shape to do so. These would be your legal scholars, governance gurus themselves and risk management specialists amongst others. As a consequence, good corporate governance as a principle would be able to cascade down to other public service structures. Notably and of interest is that there is a Ministry of Presidential Affairs, GOVERNANCE and Public Administration located at OP. Yet, OP has been caught in recent times and on more than one occasion on the wrong side of good corporate governance when one of the core functions of the ministry is GOVERNANCE. Sadly, this function is nowhere to be seen in the general I am not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination that OP has never been caught on the said wrong side of good corporate but that it is particularly so in recent times after the buoyant pronouncement of the transformation and the not business as usual agendas and all that flow with it.
From almost all key decisions by the OP on a variety of issues, serious lapses in communicating the decisions to members of the public have been subjected to serious scrutiny wherein, fresh communication would be issued. A typical example would be the statement issued after the last cabinet reshuffle where Hon Dr Unity Dow ceased to be a Minister. There are many instances where communication from the OP has been at best, ambiguous and at worst horrible. Notable is the recent announcement by OP that Steve Harvey Global has been directly appointed for the provision of radio and television production services for a period of 3 years. I will revert to this issue later in the conversation as it is one of the issues rendering OP the factory of bad corporate governance.
The OP has defended the President with all the courage and conviction it could muster on issues bordering on bad corporate governance as regards his involvement in private business deals while occupying the highest office in the land. In serious democracies, a person holding such high position would not even think of engaging in private deals whether there is law barring it or not. The President’s advisors should be able prevail over him on the dire consequences of such conduct. It would be more about the written or unwritten rules of moral and ethical conduct. The President is known to be in a business deal with the CEO of Choppies world. There is also the issue of Banyana Farms where the President has been roundly criticised for the preferential treatment he would have received above all other applicants owing to his powerful and influential position. Part of the criticism is that the President should have foregone the acquisition of a portion of Banyana Farms in favour of other upcoming Batswana farmers since he is already in a privileged position which position comes with other lifelong privileges like the presidential retirement benefits to which no other citizen is entitled to. His Press Secretary in particular is on record to have said the President is a Motswana who like any other, is in possession of an O Mang (national identity card) by which virtue, he is not precluded from such business deals. He also said the President is not violating any Botswana law by engaging in such business deals. The fact conveniently ignored is that while the President is indeed a Motswana and that there is not law barring him from doing so, he is not an ordinary Motswana once he occupies that position. The level of standard applicable to that office should be very high but has, regrettably, been lowered to the lowest levels.
Any serious and honest good corporate guru elsewhere and at OP will tell you that the above scenario is consistent with, and borders on abuse of office, that it is a good example of the serious lack of moral and ethical conduct and, does not augur well for the President in particular and the institution in general. Like I said in the opening paragraph, the OP should be the epitome and embodiment of good corporate governance as its daily bread. The sum total of the above is the total annihilation of good corporate governance and by extension and as a consequence, the creation of the factory of not only poor but very bad corporate governance. The products of this factory are spilling into the broader public service so cruelly that it is consistent with the saying ‘a fish rots from the head down.’ I am using this saying guardedly and respectfully as a consequence of lack of a better discreption. Let me deal with the Steve Harvey issue
This issue has been topical since it hit the public domain a week ago or so. From where I stand, it is not about the fellow or his company. It is all about the circumstances leading to his arrival in this country and what became of them as the end product. Steve Harvey arrived in this Republic at the invitation of the President. He would later donate medical supplies to help the fight against Covid-19 pandemic. At this stage, he had built a personal relationship with the President whereupon he was baptised with a Setswana name, Mothusi. Based on the personal relationship between the two and the important and influential position the President held, any service to, or from Harvey to OP or vice-versa would immediately raise a conflict of interest red flag. If nobody at OP never picked this red flag by omission or commission, it means conflict of interest vocabulary does not exist thereat and never will it do so. On the ground of conflict of interest which is as clear in this instance as the blue summer sky is in Botswana, appointment of Harvey for any service overseen by OP should be a no-go area. That is why Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, the Special envoy of the UN Secretary General to the Horn of Africa says ‘The majority of conflicts arise from problems of governance.’
The second issue at OP that is another perfect example of the institution becoming a factory of not only poor but bad corporate governance is that of the Acting Permanent Secretary to the President (Ag PSP). Because it is expected and justifiably so that OP should be the epitome and the embodiment of good corporate governance, issues surrounding the incumbent (Ag PSP) with respect to the alleged corruption against her as raised by the Chairman of the Botswana Public Officers Pension Fund have been held in abeyance for about three years or so. The fact that these allegations have not this far been investigated to get to the bottom of the story is a serious indictment on the OP in so far as good corporate governance is concerned. The third one is with respect to the recent transfers by OP at the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC). It has been reported the DCEC Director General was very unhappy and justifiably so in my view with such transfers because he was not consulted as an affected party. The simple courtesy would have demanded he is taken on board with such transfers because one way or the other, they would seriously impact the operations of DCEC.
With the three instances alluded to above, they point to one direction and one direction only. And that is the Office of the President is an active factory busy manufacturing not only poor but bad governance in this Republic. As a consequence, the products of this factory are all over the public service where good corporate governance has all but collapsed like a house of cards. Every ministry, department and State Owned Enterprises have emulated the highest office in the land in compromising and circumventing the principle of good corporate governance in order to suit their own circumstances and desires. Like they say, ‘a fish rots from the head down.’ If my argument that OP is a factory of bad corporate governance is correct, how will it destroy the same factories below it? Your guess is as good as mine. I am prepared to be persuaded otherwise as always. Judge for Yourself!
‘No one is safe until everyone is safe.’ Let us continue to observe all Covid-19 protocols. It is our civic duty to do so.
