President Festus Mogae likes to feign memory loss whenever the subject turns to his erstwhile friend Louis Nchindo. In a favourite bit, he would pretend to have forgotten Nchindo’s name: referring to him either as “Mochindo” or “a certain rich man”.
The play-acting provides a clue into the extent Mogae wants to conceal his history with Nchindo from the public. Hardly surprising: for most of their forty years together, the relationship between the two estranged friends has always been shrouded by intrigue, mystery and secrecy.
Nchindo is currently the subject of a multi million Pula corruption criminal case spearheaded by the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC). Although few state secrets have been divulged so far, the body language of the players in the high profile case says it all.
Government lawyers at the Department of Public Prosecutions (DPP) have been cautious and downbeat, ducking interviews with the media and repeatedly sending the case back to the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) for further investigations. In a curious turn of events, over the Christmas recess, government prosecutors tried to rush through the case so that it was heard on New Year’s Eve. The case would have coincided with Nchindo’s annual New Year’s bash which had attracted a lot of high profile guests among them South African Cabinet Ministers. In the heat of the moment, the case was leaked to the government media even before Nchindo and his co-accused were served with writs of summons.
The department of Lands, on the other hand, will not conclude its multimillion Pula land deal with Nchindo.
A legal opinion by two South African advocates insists the state has no case and suggests a witch hunt. The advocates state that “having sat through a very lengthy interview by the DCEC with Mr. Nchindo on Monday, 3 December 2007, we are satisfied that there is no basis for the DCEC to institute charges… and that the lines of enquiry which the DCEC appeared to be pursuing in that regard are devoid of merit and have no realistic prospects of success.”
Mogae and Nchindo’s relationship is full of such cloak and dagger moments. The saga of Mogae’s relationship with Nchindo is the tale of an ideologically committed president whose rise to power repeatedly pushed him towards the bounds of ethical propriety. He found himself caught up in the ruling Botswana Democratic Party shady funding processes where party leaders strategised and moved De Beers’s funds in what insiders say was a lengthy effort to obscure who was paying for what and where the money wound up; a setup that effectively amounted to money laundering.
In another secretly engineered deal, seven years ago, Mogae secretly signed away the government’s powers of attorney to Nchindo to negotiate on behalf of Botswana in a multi billion dollar De Beers restructuring deal. Nchindo emerged from the deal a millionaire while Mogae came out bitter. The result was that their friendship of forty years collapsed. Since then, the two erstwhile friends have been at it hammer and tongs.
Mogae and Nchindo’s cloak and dagger relationship and the drama that has attended the high profile corruption case have provided fodder for conspiracy theorists. They simply join the dots and a sinister outline emerges: that the trial is about more than just the disputed piece along the A1 highway to Sir Seretse Khama Airport and the controversial visit of discredited American Congressman William Jefferson.
For a long time, Nchindo’s influence on the Mogae administration was widely presumed but hard to illustrate. For example, it is widely believed that when the President was preparing for State House, he often turned to Nchindo for advice. Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) insiders talk of nocturnal meetings between Mogae, Nchindo and the then Botswana Defence Force Commander, Lt Gen Ian Khama, at Nchindo’s mansion in the suburbs of Gaborone Central. Two days before Mogae ascended to the presidency, Lt Gen Khama announced his resignation from the army. In a trade where no one puts much faith in blind coincidences, Khama’s appointment to the Vice Presidency was credited on Nchindo.
Members of the BDP so-called “Big Two” faction also believe Nchindo was instrumental in sidelining Ponatshego Kedikilwe in the contest for Vice President. Although Nchindo has never confirmed this, he has dropped enough hints to suggest that it is true. He likes to regale friends with stories of how Mogae was toying around with the idea of making Kedikilwe Vice President “until the Tlokweng incident.” By the Tlokweng incident, he is referring to the alleged mid night meeting of the Big two faction in Tlokweng where they allegedly plotted to shore up Kedikilwe’s position.
A reconstruction of the rise and fall of Nchindo’s relationship with Mogae suggests that the Debswana Managing Director was an ingenuous power player who used Mogae’s weaknesses and his friendship with the president to strengthen own hand. Nchindo had mammoth ambitions. From the beginning, the man wanted to cultivate a span of influence that would extend far beyond his established power base of diamond mining into agriculture, tourism and become, by all intents and purposes, the power behind the presidency.
In his interview with DCEC chief, Tymon Katlholo last month, Nchindo stated that “I had a dream of developing tourism in the country by setting the hotels in Gaborone, Maun and Kasane. I still have that dream.”
Nchindo said the dream was “in my personal capacity. I tried to pursue Debswana to join me to develop the hotels.” The hotel planned for Gaborone was to be built on Nchindo’s disputed plot along the A1 highway, which is currently at the centre of the corruption case.
For a time, all things seemed possible as Mogae and Nchindo in step marched hand in hand. Sources inside the government enclave like to tell the story of how Members of Parliament used to lobby Nchindo to get them appointed into cabinet.
Even Cabinet Ministers used to refer to him whenever they wanted to know what was going on inside the president’s head. When speculation was rife about who would be Mogae’s Vice President, the then Cabinet Minister and BDP Secretary General, Daniel Kwelagobe, confided in Nchindo that he was worried David Magang was going to be the next Vice President.
Kwelagobe and Magang, though both Molepolole men, had never seen eye to eye.
The reason for Kwelagobe’s apprehension was the close friendship between Magang and Mogae. Nchindo retorted that “if that is the way you look at it, then Gobe Matenge has a better chance. He is closer to Mogae than Magang.”
Stories doing the rounds in the corridors of power reveal how Assistant Minister Olifant Mfa first got to know about his appointment to cabinet through Nchindo.
At the time, Mfa was causing a lot of trouble for cabinet from the backbenches, from where he was calling Vice President Ian Khama all sorts of names.
At one point the maverick Mfa even went as far as to demand that he be given the money for his constituency to take it to where it belonged; Sebina/Gweta. Worried about Mfa’s irrational pranks, Mogae decided to rope the maverick into cabinet as a junior minister from where he would be restrained to yell his mind by collective responsibility.
But before an official announcement could be made that Mfa had finally realized his dream into cabinet, it is understood Louis Nchindo whispered to the legislator’s daughter, obviously for the benefit of the father’s ear “to tell your old man to behave, because we are considering appointing him to Cabinet.”
Mfa, who was given to abrasive outbursts in parliament piped down. A few weeks later he was appointed Assistant Minister of Presidential Affairs. He has remained in cabinet ever since.
Nchindo’s brash style, however, often clashed with the culturally conservative government enclave. Although he was not exactly the power behind the throne of popular lore, many people were drawn to his moxie and apparent influence.
His bravery and abrasive disposition, his knack for risk, not to speak of a flamboyant and exuberant lifestyle, a hearty and disarming laughter combined with street charm and fondness for detail made Nchindo an asset for a president still groping for a footing in a party literally baying for his blood.
From early on, Mogae and Nchindo were an odd combination ÔÇô here was an introverted and clearly reluctant master who always shied away from a fight, flirting with an extroverted aide, an outspoken power player who took no hostages and insisted on the master hitting the ground running.
The relationship though worked, at least for sometime. Although it’s probable that Mogae may have set his own course, it was always in the direction that Nchindo preferred.
There is another feeling, difficult to dismiss that enjoying his influence and perhaps owing to his immodesty and carried away by the success of his plans, Nchindo always overplayed an impression, perhaps too much that he was actually the brains and power behind the throne.
When the country started agitating for diamond beneficiation, President Mogae went against the advice of his friend of long standing and Minister of Mineral Resources and Water Affairs, David Magang, and took sides with Nchindo.
Magang was championing the national campaign for beneficiation, while Nchindo, the De Beers point man in Botswana, was dead set against bringing diamond cutting and polishing to Botswana.
As a minister in the previous administration, Magang had tried to sell beneficiation to Cabinet, but there were no buyers. The then president, Sir Ketumile Masire, and his deputy, Festus Mogae, had been sold onto the De Beers/Nchindo propaganda machine and were in no mood to establish a cutting industry in Botswana.
Magang was punching above his weight. De Beers was the main financier of the ruling Botswana Democratic Party and also spent millions of Pula to help a peaceful transition from Masire to Mogae.
“I had no support from top to bottom, however much I tried. My President and Vice President thought I was mad,” Magang recalls.
Treated to generous quantities of wine and champagne, even local newspaper headline writers who attended regular briefings from Debswana Managing Director were convinced that Magang was a buffoon.
“At the time, I felt terribly lonely. Very few Batswana knew about diamonds. It was me, the President, the Vice President, the Attorney General, Minister of Finance and their officials. These were key ministers involved in negotiations with De Beers. We were supposed to be the leading diamond producer in the world. It made sense that we should understand diamonds just as we understand cattle. But De Beers had deliberately kept Batswana in the dark. I became the butt of Cabinet jokes when discussions turned to diamonds. Mogae used to laugh saying that at least I had been consistent for years in my beneficiation campaign.”
Frustrated and almost broken, one day, in a fit of madness Magang walked into De Beers offices in Johannesburg and started railing about how De Beers had deliberately kept Batswana in the dark about the diamond industry. He pointed out that in the 25 years that De Beers had been operating in Botswana; it had not trained a single citizen on the workings of the diamond industry.
Never fond of each other to begin with, Magang’s campaign for beneficiation further poisoned his relationship with Nchindo. When Mogae took over as president he moved Magang from the all too powerful Ministry of Mineral Resources and replaced him with the timid Boometswe Mokgothu. Magang was the only minister who was moved during the reshuffle.
Nchindo, who was riding the wave of influence, would go on and on about how the new replacement, Boometswe Mokgothu was the best choice for the ministry, fuelling speculation that, as in many other previous instances, he had influenced Mogae’s decision.
The trio (Mogae, Mokgothu and Nchindo) would later sideline the whole government enclave during discussions for the $17.6 billion deal to privatize and delist De Beers Corporation from both the Johannesburg and New York Stock Exchanges. The Oppenheimer family, which had controlled much of the world diamond trade for more than 70 years, wanted to tighten its already powerful grip with the multi-billion dollar agreement to turn De Beers into a private company in partnership with its sister corporation, Anglo America, and the Botswana government.
Under the agreement, De Beer’s stockholders were bought out by a consortium to be called DB Investments, in which Anglo American and the Oppenheimer family through their Central Holdings would jointly have an 85 percent stake. The remaining 15 percent went to Debswana which was jointly owned by the De Beers and the Botswana government. It was a noisy, opaque and somewhat untidy corporate affair.
In a secretly engineered operation, Mogae signed away the government’s power of attorney to Nchindo to negotiate on behalf of Botswana, this despite the fact that Nchindo was a well known De Beers’s point man and a senior member of the De Beers Executive board in his own capacity.
It was an extraordinary step. Efforts were put in place to bypass Cabinet, Parliament and the civil service bureaucracy and to keep the whole thing secret, away from officials who were likely to object until it was too late. Senior government officials, including Debswana Board Members, read about Nchindo’s role from the Reuters News agency.
Among those excluded were the then Attorney General, Phandu Skelemani, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Minerals Morago Ngidi and the Debswana board of directors.
The De Beers buy out was the second largest private transaction ever done in the world and was shrouded in a lot of secrecy. A lawyer from WWB, a leading South African law firm that handled the transaction on behalf of De Beers would later recall that “in true merger and acquisition fashion, transactions like these have code names, the parties have code names, and you never refer to the party by their real name. You do as much as you can to maintain the confidentiality. I was amazed that the leak took so long considering that there were a number of legal firms, investment banks, the whole of the Anglo board, their executive committee, let alone the De Beers board involved. I reckon the inner circle must have numbered nearly forty people. Leaks normally happen very quickly in transactions, so given the size of this one and the companies involved, that it took three months for the story to make headlines was remarkable.”
Although the outlines of the tale have become part of the Botswana corridors of power lore, what has not been disclosed are the full details of the agreement between Mogae, Nchindo and Mokgothu. Nchindo is rumoured to have made millions of Dollars in the De Beers deal and there are many blurred accounts of what Mogae’s expectations on his bosom buddy were. It is, however, agreed that the outcome was a big fallout between two old friends with Mogae emerging from the deal a deeply unhappy man. This resulted in open animosity that festers to this day.
Although Nchindo’s lawyers are confident that the state does not have a case against their client, they are worried that it could ruin him. So far, the Department of Lands will not conclude the sale of the land to Nchindo and TDC. The TDC has, however, gone ahead with development and the state has not filed a court application to stop the developments.
