Nchindo in words

| Friday February 12, 2010 00:00

“(Nchindo requested that) I should stop the prosecution and that if I fail, he would reveal that President Ketumile Masire was bailed out, that BDP has been sponsored or funded by Debswana during elections”

Former President Festus Mogae accusing Nchindo of trying to blackmail him into stopping the criminal case against him, quoted by the weekly newspaper The Guardian.  As I have stated on a number of occasions, when I became President in 1980. I quickly discovered that I ceased to have control over my own time and thus could no longer actively attend to my farming interests. It was in this context that I welcomed an offer by Louis Nchindo of De Beers, as the company then had its own extensive agricultural interests in the region, to assist me in recruiting a manager for the farm that I was then struggling to maintain in Ghanzi. A loan programme was thus also put into place to finance the said individual’s employment. In this regard it should be noted that I provided collateral through the sale of my own properties. While this was a private business arrangement it was never a secret.

With the perfect vision of hindsight, I would not now enter into such an arrangement. Beyond the fact that it would not conform to today’s more rigorous guidelines for good governance, which I fully embrace, its outcome was also an object lesson for me in the pitfalls of trying to manage a commercial farm by remote control. In the end I had to cut my losses by leasing my properties until I finally retired from public office. Former President Ketumile Masire on the assistance extended to him by De Beers, arranged by Louis Nchindo, who was working for De Beers during Masire’s time as state president.

“...what is readily apparent from the above is that the DPP and the Directorate (DCEC) have repeatedly breached undertakings as to when documents and statements would be delivered”

“The applicants have been frustrated and financially prejudiced by the delay in the commencement of the trial, and consider their rights to have been egregiously infringed”

Nchindo in his founding affidavit appealing Magistrate Lot Moroka’s judgement against him.  “It cannot be said that the court should stop to allow an appeal process everytime an accused person complains of unfairness in a trial. It is in the interest of justice that proceedings should be allowed to run their course uninterrupted, even when an accused person may feel aggrieved, subject to whatever exceptions the law may permit. Such simplistic reasoning, we maintain, is wrong”

Directorate of Public Prosecution’s Kgosietsile Ngakaagae in his answering affidavit on the same matter.

I don’t understand what (the DPP) means by saying that “the proper and lawful procedure would simply been (sic) to file grounds and have the matter referred by the Magistrate on the relevant portion of the record”. If (the) contention is that the applicants should have waited until the end of the criminal trial to have the issues considered by the (High Court), then that is nonsensical; the applicants need to have the problems resolved before the start of the criminal trial. Nchindo in his replying affidavit defending the decision of his lawyers requesting the High Court, to suspendproceedings in the Magistrate Court while the former deliberates on his application to have Moroka’s order reviewed.

Nchindo served two uninterrupted tenures as Debswana Managing Director. Why De Beers ever let go of him is a mystery; for, to me, he was the most devout champion of their interests, the local chapter’s high priest of the De Beers dogma. As Debswana MD Nchindo was pro-De Beers; there was scarcely a single issue, I venture to say, regarding which the two took contrary positions. On the issue of beneficiation for instance I was as demonstrated earlier, a strong advocate of its application in Botswana whereas Nchindo was dead set against the idea, which was precisely the De Beers position. For Nchindo, who was an Oxford-trained economist to advocate a view that portrayed beneficiation at the local level as little more than a fantasy was unpatriotic, I thought. I like to think in him we had a citizen at the helm of the most economically significant company in the country but there were times when I thought he was more of a ‘De Beer-ian’, if there us such a term than otherwise.   Former Minister of Mineral Resources David Magang on his spats with Nchindo over diamond beneficition in Magang’s Autobiography The Magic of Perseverance Even as a student Nchindo was a hedonist; he was a man of lofty tastes and loved the high life.

The fact that he was the only student from Botswana who went around in his own car speaks for itself. The little stipend that we got from government was well-supplemented by his father, who, as a retired police officer, had to dig deep into his pockets to meet highly exacting demands of his pleasure-seeking son. Magang, in his autobiography The Magic of Perseverance, on Nchindo’s student years in England.  “When we arrived in Cape Town, he told me to abort the unborn child. I thought he loved me. He told me he couldn’t have a child with me because he’s a married man. I didn’t know he was married until he told me the bad news. I was reluctant to abort my baby but he told me he wasn’t going to book us a flight back to Joburg if I didn’t agree. I agreed and after that he left me. I can’t even get hold of him on the phone”  Thando Hleli a young South Africa woman who accuses Nchindo of abandoning her after she fell pregnant, in a story which appeared in the South African newspaper Sunday World 

“At a media cocktail hosted by President Mogae at the state house in December last year President Mogae could have given an indication that he has fallen out with his one-time bosom friend.

“Ke ne ke laleditswe ke tsala ya me ya mohumi Mochindo,” Mogae told the media about a party that they had in Kasane at the invitation of Nchindo. There was of course some discernible sarcasm on the ‘tsala ya me ya mohumi’( my rich friend). The name Nchindo was of course corrupted to Mochindo ,not once but twice at least.

There was laughter all around the state house gardens at the president’s sense of humour but this could have been Mogae’s way of communicating a relationship that has comatosed to the point that he could not even bring himself to pronounce a name of a former friend. In January 31, when the two met in court ,if their relationship had not irretrievably broken down, it would certainly go for the last litmus test. In the upcoming case against Nchindo and other former employees of Debswana, Mogae is listed as one of those people that Nchindo had deceived in a bid to acquire state land in Gaborone.  It stands to reason that if count two is to stand, legal experts say, president Mogae would have to give evidence in court against his (former) friend. In a litigation friends that find themselves in opposing corners became adversaries and their friendship is replaced by hostility.” Gideon Nkala writing in Mmegi in January 2008