Not so long ago Government closed down BCL before immediately putting it up for sale.
To say the BCL sale has been shrouded in secrecy would be risking being guilty of understatement.
Nobody knows what is happening, except of course the president, his family and perhaps the minister responsible.
A few weeks ago a news report that BCL would be sold to the Arabs under a complex debt assumption agreement that would see Government getting no more than $1 for the much prized asset.
Government is still to formally brief the nation on the state of the negotiations.
In the meantime Selibe Phikwe, which has always relied on BCL mine for sustenance is past the state of a ghost town.
The body that was designed to coordinate disposal of Government assets, is nowhere in the picture.
It has been shunted by the sideways.
While by many the BCL matter was disgusting enough, not least because the mine was closed under bogus reasons, more was still to come.
Just a few weeks, murmurs of national carrier, Air Botswana being doled to the tourism outfit, Wilderness Safaris resurfaced.
This after years of denial by Government that Air Botswana was going to be given at discounted terms to Wilderness, a company owned and run by President Ian Khama’s friends and in which he has a sizeable interest and stake ÔÇô directly and also indirectly through his family trust.
Even president Khama’s most ardent supporters have found this hard to believe.
This is not what they had expected from their hero.
To say they have been disappointed, is again an understatement.
They feel not just taken for a ride or fleeced, but robbed by their hero.
The silence of their hero has been even more hurtful, especially coming after his shameless greed to get himself a retirement package that none of them is able to explain, much less justify.
Air Botswana is a state company created by an Act of Parliament.
For it to change hands, the process has to be ratified by parliament through creation of statute.
Not that Khama would have any resistance from parliament.
But the fact that even after cowing Parliament, he still see nothing wrong circumventing the House before he does state assets to himself and his friends, opens altogether new fronts in our fast marching state of impunity on our leaders.
Parliament is not the only institution rendered important on this ongoing saga.
The privatization agency, PEEPA has also been reduced to a joke.
One wonders what the Board and executive management of PEEPA wake up every morning to do if companies like Air Botswana can be offloaded without PEEPA saying any word.
Just what do PEEPA executives consider their mandate to be if cabinet has all but usurped their day to day roles.
In South Africa, a public debate is raging that those in power create a myriad of parastatals and then make a smoke screen that they are failing so that there is a pretext to sell such companies to themselves, their families and friends.
Through its ongoing asset stripping, Botswana has become a mirror image of events in South Africa.
There is no doubt that cabinet is standing shoulder to shoulder to President Khama is his looting escapades.
If that was not so we would have a number of ministers either resigning, or at least being sacked for speaking out, or at the very least for resisting.
None of those has happened.
Equally disappointing has been opposition.
By now, official opposition should have released a statement opposing what news has been troubling the nation about Air Botswana.
That has not happened.
Additionally, opposition should make it clear to those purported buyers that there shall be legal consequences for their actions if due process is not followed.
Those consequences should in future seizing those assets and giving them back to the nation without compensation.
