Mosimakoko promises to clean sweep BQA
Innocent Selatlhwa | Monday October 18, 2021 06:00
She also boasts that corruption and bribery that affect quality of our education are becoming a thing of the past. “Just after a month in office, I found out that BQA had 7,000 applications backlog in various sections. We then came up with a backlog eradication programme. Worked hard in small teams. I studied the environment, and it showed that we had lots of issues with stakeholders.
We were not in a good position to guide the educational sector with the backlog. Some providers had long applied and still no response,” she told the Parliamentary Committee on Statutory Bodies and State Enterprises. Mosimakoko said the project is at 74% and they hope to reach 80% by the end of the year.
She said for them to lower the numbers of backlog it is important to establish what was wrong. “We had to review our processes and asked ourselves questions as an environment dealing with audits, assessments on others and had to reengineer our processes. Indeed we need to grow as an authority and strive to get at a certain point to satisfy the National Qualifications Framework and being able to be recognised elsewhere,” she said. She said they realised that they have an Act that needs to be reviewed to close existing gaps and align it with the legislative landscape so they may be in harmony with other industry players.
She said they are currently doing skills audit to align what they need to their strategy. Mosimakoko also said BQA received a subvention of P74.9 million for the year under review being 2019/2020 and raised a revenue of P7.9 million from services such as registration and accreditation of Education and Training Providers, learning programmes and evaluation of qualifications.. “Some of the challenges are inadequate capacity to undertake BQA mandate. We have therefore, established strategic partnerships and networks to ensure global competitiveness of Botswana. We also have misalignment of acts. To address that, the Act is undergoing review,” Mosimakoko said. She also said inadequate financial resources, inadequate implementation of the Board mandate all affects implementation of plans. That is why she had requested for funds. But was not approved. Quizzed on security arms of government coming to sniff at BQA, Mosimakoko said, “there is a 2017/18 report that showed anomalies on how things were done.
Another report from the Ombudsman also found us not well. We learnt from the reports and through audits going forward using the reports we will head into the right direction. It also touches into issues of corruption and receiving bribes. When it comes to this, it might not be glaring in your face that it happens. It will come out when you ask a lot of questions and read into responses and use the data you have as an accounting officer to try and make better evidence based decisions.
That is when you realise things were not done the right way and find a way to correct that.” The Committee chair, Dr Nevah Tshabang asked why security arms spent time at their offices and whether she is in control in terms of corruption in terms of registering and accrediting courses. She said there are measures in place to correct that. She said amongst the remedies, they stopped contracting experts but rather introduced a new system of peer review. She said this was because they found that some experts would be paid for work they never did. On issues of acting appointments, Mosimakoko said they had parted ways with Deputy CEO while Chief Finance Officer retired as a result of the investigations at the Authority.