Deputy Clerk of the Parliamentary Tutu Tsiang has struggled to explain to the Committee on Statutory Bodies and State Enterprises how a Parliamentary report on Minister of Environment, Natural Resources and Tourism Tshekedi Khama’s damning report of his involvement at Botswana Tourism Organization disappeared.
While appearing before the committee, Tsiang said she was unable to explain how the Parliament lost the files unless an investigation is launched to establish what could have happened. “I don’t have answers, there needs to be an investigation.” The committee struggled to get its hands on the report, to compile a recommendation to be presented before Parliament. The committee chair, Samson Guma Moyo says the committee learnt in May that the record went missing. Infact, he says what the committee has been getting is reconciliation of bits of information gleaned from different sourced as a cover up. “You attempted to reconcile files by picking different parts of information, I have evidence.”
It emerges that the files disappeared with the exit of then Clerk Shabani Chikamabo who had been mandated to work on the report. Tsiang says a number of documents which were confidential were in his custody. Chikambo was redeployed to the Attorney General after his contract with former employ elapsed. It appears that before he left he had not completed his task, raising questions of lack of processes to take care of the lapses according to the committee.
“The gentlemen was on a contract, Parliament knew he would leave, what he was handling, as a way of supervision, would you have not have known that at his pace he would not have finished the job?” Committee member Phenyo Butale quizzes.
In defense, Tsiang says they had submitted a recommendation for the Clerk to be retrained only to be turned down by the Permanent Secretary (PS). The committee was stunned to learn that Chikambo was still working on the report despite that he was out of office. The files carried evidence of Khama’s involvement at the BTO. Khama is believed by the committee to have been abusing his power, throwing his weight about at the ministerial level and the BTO. He was ‘illegally’ involved in un-procedural tenders. Khama has also deliberately allowed BTO to run without a board, a move seen by the committee to create a vacuum for him to run the show. The committee observed that BTO’s decision have been centralized at ministerial level so much that Khama fell out with then CEO Thabo Dithebe and his former Permanent Secretary Elias Magosi. Both Magosi and Dithebe quit thereafter.
