President Duma Boko on Friday told a gathering in Selibe Phikwe that the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime needed some retailoring.
We wholly agree with the president.
The last five years under Mokgweetsi Masisi were the hardest for the DCEC.
The directorate lost too many directors general.
So bad was the situation that Batswana simply lost faith in the DCEC.
The DCEC became a battleground of power plays that included the intelligence services, DIS.
The low point was when the DCEC was tricked into rubber stamping a silly decision that former president Ian Khama had stolen P10 billion.
Too many DCEC investigators found themselves under the direct control of DIS.
No reasons were left.
To this day there are some senior people who are at DCEC not because they have the requisite skills but because they were put there for rigged reasons that included ensuring that no investigations happened against top people at DIS.
And when Tymon Katholo investigated some of Masisi’s inner circle at the office of the president, Katholo had effectively signed his death warrant.
He was humiliated, lied against including being hounded by state sponsored trolls.
That is how low DCEC was prepared to drag its name in the mud just to protect some people accused of corruption.
Katholo ultimately went to court, not to clear his name but to prove that DIS was bullying DCEC. Thankfully the courts agreed with him.
The President has talked about retailoring the DCEC.
We want to add that he should go beyond just the DCEC. The DIS also needs retailoring.
Masisi had promised to remake the DIS.
Things got worse under him.
It became a rogue organization that was feared and unanswerable to no authority, not even the Head of state.
Too many careers were destroyed during that time.
Too many lives were lost. We should draw a line in the sane and say – never again!
The case of two DIS officials who themselves used to be the darlings of that organization goes a long way to show that DIS had totally lost its way.
Yet Masisi was helpless against all those, simply because he had been captured.
Boko should himself be careful not to get captured.
The retailoring of these organisations should make them future proof.
This means making them capable of withstanding bigger forces than the one we recently saw that just flushed DCEC away.
DCEC needs a director general who does not serve at the mercy of a president.
The DCEC needs to become autonomous from the office of the president.
A DCEC director general should never again take instructions from a DIS director general.
As for the DIS it should serve not a president, not a ruling party but the constitution and the state.
More to the point, the DIS should not continue to work as an employment bureau for retired soldiers and retired police officers.
DIS needs to become a serious security organization that takes care of national security interests like trade and international relations.
DIS should collect intelligence and as its Act states hand over the cases to other organisations like DCEC and the police.
DIS should not become a paramilitary organization which effectively decimates the military by recruiting special forces from the Botswana Defence Force.
Part of the retailoring that the president talked about should include resuscitating the cases that Katholo had investigated and was about to take to court when a decision was taken to stop and ultimately sack him.
Part of retailoring DCEC should include honouring people like Tymon Katholo who suffered so much for doing right.
