This week, government announced the appointment of Augustine Makgonatsotlhe as the new Ombudsman.
Instead of congratulating the man, we may as well weep for him.
In a short spell Makgonatsotlhe will discover just how cold it can be inside this office.
He will in that short time also discover how thankless his job can be and perhaps most crucially, also discover just how exposed he is – from all the flanks, so to speak.
That is not how it always was ÔÇô certainly not at the beginning when the office was created with a lot of hope, fanfare and expectation.
The establishment of the Office of Ombudsman was supposed to usher an era of hope for an ordinary member of the public.
The office was supposed to keep the excesses of public administration on check and offer the public recourse for redress against an abnormally powerful state machinery.
In other jurisdictions, what we call the Ombudsman here is called the “Public Protector”. And not without a reason!
The degeneration of the office of Ombudsman over the years is a glaring example of how a state institution can with time be hijacked and be strategically crafted so as to hoodwink, dupe and dribble public opinion into a false belief that their clamour for accountability for those in power is being heeded.
In our instance that same tactic has been used with regard to the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime, and now increasingly, with the Directorate of Public Prosecutions.
None of the named institutions is by any degree performing the mandate for which they were created. The saddest tragedy of it all is that after losing faith in these organizations the public has chosen to simply move on.
While all the three organizations were created to inspire public faith in due process, they have to varying degrees instead morphed into a portent and convenient cover for those in authority to use their mere existence as proof that Botswana is fine, that Botswana is not a corrupt country.
Rather than submitting those in power to public scrutiny, these organizations are now part of a well cloaked apparatus that does not just hide excesses by those in power, but also in effect provides justifications for such excesses.
Rather than promote accountability, these institutions have been turned into instruments of self-justification by those in power.
In the entire public service, there is no better example (save perhaps with the exception of the DCEC and DPP) of strategic misuse of a well intended public institution by those in power than what we see with the Office of the Ombudsman.
Really when you come to look at it, the Ombudsman has become a caricature of the lofty ambitions for which it was originally established. Compared to its equivalent in say South Africa, our Office of Ombudsman has been reduced to a game played by kindergarten school kids.
Equally, when you look at the DCEC today, one cannot help but hang their head in shame at what a shadow of itself the office has become. One doubts even if the DCEC founding director, Graham Stockwell would recognize his brainchild were he to walk back into that office. The same really applies to DPP. While the public had expected some level of detachment of the DPP from the executive, in practice what we see is a DPP that is increasingly being submerged under that the mudflow of a rapacious executive arm of government.
For the Ombudsman things started to go peer shaped the moment the then Head of State, President Festus Mogae defended the unmitigated abuse of army aircraft by his deputy by saying he had ordered such abuse in his capacity as the commander in chief ÔÇô yet another example of Mogae’s enduring destruction of this country’s democratic institutions emanating from his weakness to enforce order when it came to dealing with his vice president at the time.
The Ombudsman had said the piloting of army aircraft by a non-army officer amounted to unconscionable abuse.
The then bearer of the office, Lethebe Maine stood for what he believed was right, but was let down by a Head of State who when it came to his deputy routinely behaved like a man of straw.
Thanks to Mogae’s weakness and vacillation, the Ombudsman was left exposed, embarrassed, weakened and irreparably damaged.
Since then the office has with time become not only powerless but also directionless, disoriented and now, irrelevant.
The last nail on the coffin has been its loss of public trust of which it is now totally bereft.
This is in no way to question the integrity of those that have led this office.
Much less, this is not a veiled attack at the incoming Makgonatsotlhe, whose arrival is in any case preceded by controversy.
Rather it is an attempt at highlighting the depth of malaise that Makgonatsotlhe should expect.
This malaise is a result of a pervasive strand of thinking in the current administration which eschews all known tenets of good governance and also wrongly believes that every legal power extended to the Head of State should, as a rule, be deployed as a means to an end.
Captured as it is, it is unimaginable that the Office of Ombudsman in Botswana would be able to withstand the barrage of abuse comparable to what the office in South Africa had to go through after confronting President Jacob Zuma for his abuse of public finance.
When all is said and done, especially when measured against public expectations and the dreams for which the office of Ombudsman was created, this office has become an embodiment of an unfulfilled dream, a classic case of an agency that not only lost its way but also got captured along that way.
No wonder not many people in our country can say with any level of certainty just what the Office of Ombudsman was created for.
