ETCETRA ||

SANDY GRANT | Monday November 15, 2010 00:00

We had every hope of seeing X on the day we were to visit Molepolole, but because Air Botswana had messed up our flight arrangements we had to return early to Gaborone. (An email note from a friend in Canada, which I received earlier this year.) To suggest that transport, telecommunications and tourism are interlinked sectors of enormous importance to the country is to state the obvious. Yet it requires only a brief scan of the coverage of those areas in the newspapers in the last week to become more than a little concerned.

Take Air Botswana and Mmegi's report (9.11.10) that Chobe Holdings has joined a growing list of Air Botswana castigators labelling the national carrier's sub-standard service as the single biggest challenge to the growth of the tourism industry in this country and the Guardian's (12.11.10) that the four and five star rating of the Chobe Groups hotels have been seriously compromised by our national carrier's failure to deliver a remotely comparable service and that the situation had been further exacerbated by the discontinuance of the direct Johannesburg-Maun route by the Civil Aviation Authority.

Those are serious issues and unsurprisingly Mmegi weighed in with a heavy weight editorial (12. 11.10) expressing dismay at the Civil Aviation Authoritys performance and concern that Air Botswana's security and standards is at risk in no longer being a member of IATA. But just to ensure that everyone is totally confused as to what is happening, the Guardian on the same day (12.11.10) carried an Air Botswana advert announcing that its Johannesburg-Maun link is now back and running the irony of its standard accompanying jingle, Going Your Way would not have amused Jonathan Gibson of Chobe Holdings.

But the country really should be deeply concerned about the shambles at both Air Botswana and the CAA both of which are supposed to be managed by boards of proven ability. What has gone so incredibly wrong that a newly appointed expatriate Chief Executive of Air Botswana (yes, yet another) should grasp what is going on, decide that he wants nothing to do with it, park his car at the airport with a resignation letter to the Board Chairman attached to the windscreen and take the first flight out.

By the looks of things that gentleman was a lot smarter than Thapelo Lippe, briefly the CEO of the Botswana Telecommunications Corporation, who might also have presumed that what was wanted by those who appointed him was results, a turn- around in performance, a leap from an under-performing, demoralised, loss-making parastatal to one which could hold its head high. But of course, matters are rarely that simple not least because the issues involved are invariably diverse and involve sensitive long-standing personal interests. Those who get some of these key posts are therefore, expected to conform to established norms, to understand how the system works and most certainly to avoid rocking the boat.

The current Lippegate saga suggests that for once, the standard formula went wrong. Lippe did not follow the example of his Air Botswana counterpart by obligingly breaking his contract, when he understood the set up, and getting on the first plane to Maun (sorry). He stuck around, and if he had been on a performance related salary, he would now be a happy man because in the only year during which he was employed, he achieved for the BTC net profits of P138 million, the highest in 10 years. The Mmegi reporter (10.11.10) went over the moon as he recorded that the, BTC's operating revenues nearly touched the P1 billion mark at P958.4 million, up 14.7 percent from 2009.

The parastatal was also able to shave P60 million off its debts for the year and halved the cost of its loans to P10.28 million. Other financial indicators such as capital expenditure, debt to equity ratio and growth prospects were all positive with the BTC due (able) to pay the government a P45.3 million dividend! Anyone outside the system must marvel that the person who achieved this astonishingly rapid transformation is the very same person who was first suspended and then fired.

But then they would hardly have failed to note that institutional failure is so frequently tolerated whilst institutional success can sometimes be thoroughly unwelcome. On the face of it, the outsider observer could conclude that Lippes blunder may have been to put the interests of the taxpayer and country before any others. But to demonstrate that this was not so, it only needs an explanation from the BTC Board - if it still legally exists as to why it is so intent on crucifying someone who marvelously achieved what, presumably, it requested him to achieve.