Thamane's office hides evidence from DCEC

| Monday May 20, 2013 00:00

On the positive side of this statement we are glad that she at least did not try to deny that there is corruption and maladministration at CEDA.  Further more, we totally agree with her, because The Citizens Against Corruption (CAC) also advices the general public to report the rot at CEDA.Notwithstanding, we believe that people should not be misled into thinking that it is as easy as just reporting without understanding the challenges they will face.  Reliable people who have worked at CEDA have explained to us why it is very difficult for DCEC to catch perpetrators.  Firstly it is very easy for CEDA to bury any evidence that might be used against them.  Unlike Botswana Unified Revenue Services (BURS), Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) cannot use the element of surprise and raid CEDA offices, they first have to give a notice, which gives the perpetrators a few weeks' head start to cover their tracks.  The notice goes through the CEO's office, and any documents that come out go through the CEO's office, and because CEDA is registered as a company, it has the right to withhold anything that may be deemed as self-incriminating, which means that they will screen documents and remove anything that can lead to law suits and so forth. 

Also the documents are left there such that the perpetrator (any CEDA employee) can go through them and remove anything that can be used against them, and because of this easy access to documents, this gives the CEO and the perpetrator plausible deniability when it comes to missing evidence.  Also CEDA takes advantage of the fact that DCEC is understaffed, i.e. they have multitudes of cases on their hands, and therefore CEDA or the CEO can bury DCEC with stacks of irrelevant documents or less damaging documents (which is usually the case), and since the investigators will not know what they are looking for until they stumble upon it, they usually cannot notice that there are missing documents.  One branch manager told us that, there was a DCEC officer that was stationed at CEDA for some months, she said that she was incapable of discovering things, which in the branch manager's opinion would have been damaging to CEDA.

Furthermore, the complaining process at CEDA is very flawed, if the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Thabo Thamane is the problem, and you want to complain about him to the chairperson, the letter has to go through him first, that means he can go through the contents of the documents, and if damaging can later punish you for it.  If you go and complain at the Ministry of Trade and Industry you find that they are very restricted because CEDA has autonomy, if you go to the office of the President, the appeals office tells you that they cannot investigate the matter unless the Minister of Trade and Industry Dorcus Makgato-Malesu asks them to do so. Meanwhile they will frustrate your business using state resources.  If you try and go the court route they can just drag the court case for years, which may result in you losing lots of money, after all they are not using their personal funds.  Basically it is a mountain to climb when trying to get justice at CEDA and it can be years before you can get any because everything is structured in their favour.

According to some of the employees at CEDA, the management does not respect the board, especially the civil servants, they believe that they do not know what they are doing, and think that some of their proposals are absurd, such as the suggestion that CEDA car allowances be reduced.  Also, if you apply at CEDA and are rejected, appealing to the board most of the time will not help because the board seldomly overturns a decision made by the management.  The lady who told us this said that it was because some members of the board, even though they have high qualifications, were still not qualified enough to assess businesses, as some of them only had degrees for disciplines like Agronomy, and also had little or no experience in the running of businesses.  Therefore the board relies on the management because they believe that they are experts and know what they are doing.

That is why if they have targeted you, like they have targeted Mr Robert Masitara, the Member of Parliament who stated that management in parastatals and other government entities that are overpaid, you will not get funded. Some of the employees have informed us that Member of Parliament Robert Masitara was recently rejected because everyone at CEDA wanted to punish him for the callous statements he made in the media.Tshipa also said that going to Facebook will not help, we would like to say that, since CEDA employees abuse state resources to destroy and drown out people, we thought that the only chance of getting justice is if we pooled our resources together and fought together against corruption.

Thabo MookiCitizens Against Corruption (CAC)