Nchindo was a De Beers fan, says Magang

| Friday July 11, 2008 00:00

As minister, my most acrimonious relations were not with people who fell directly under me but with heads of para-statals that fell within the ambit of my ministry. My most tempestuous spats were with Louis Nchindo, Olebile Gaborone and Joshua Galeforolwe, with those involving the latter two resonating into the public domain.

Like me, Nchindo was brought up in Molepolole. I knew his family reasonably well. His father was a police officer. He was his parents' only child, his father having originally come from Barotseland in Zambia and his mother being a local from Tlokweng.

Nchindo and I were academic contemporaries in England. He was at Oxford with Festus Mogae and I was at the University of London.

We were both members of the Botswana Overseas Students Union (Bosu), which we headed at various stages. His profile as the union's president was lacklustre. The organisation slipped into anonymity overnight and it would take years before it recaptured its initial sparkle.

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. His father supplemented the little stipend that we got from government. As a retired police officer, he had to dig deep into his pockets to meet the highly exacting demands of his pleasure-seeking son.

In his pecuniary claims on his father, Nchindo hardly gave the old man a breather. The SOS's kept coming thick and fast. In 1966, when Festus and I came home on holiday, the old man invited us to his house in Tlokweng, with a view to extracting a brief on how we were coping at varsity given the stressfully high cost of education and subsistence in England.

He hardly believed us when we told him that our government had taken care of our education. We kept so well that we did not lack anything at all. The need for parental assistance on any scale did not arise.

I doubted whether this revelation stemmed the spate of monetary appeals from Oxford.

Nchindo served two interrupted tenures as Debswana managing director. Why De Beers ever let go of him is a mystery. To me, he was the most devout champion of their interests; the local chapter's high priest of the De Beers dogma.

They probably owe him a higher debt of gratitude than they do any other Motswana. In any case, they did not exactly dump him. They simply shunted him to their Siamese twin, Anglo American, though in a capacity that was not as glamorous and as prestigious as the Debswana perch.

De Beers and the Botswana Government in favour of Baledzi Gaolathe sidelined him, and he behaved as if bereaved. He desperately wanted his job back.

One way in which he sought to bounce back was to befriend me as the minister in charge of Debswana as, theoretically speaking, the company was basically an independent entity.

He made a habit of coming round to Mana House, my Phakalane residence, every Sunday morning and chatting me up for the greater part of the morning.

He always brought me a copy of the South African Sunday Times, which he paid for. I like to believe the subsidy was made in good faith. He made no secret of the fact that he wanted my endorsement for his reinstatement at Debswana when the incumbent MD Baledzi Gaolathe's contract ended.

Gaolathe's contract neared expiry in December 1996. Nicky Oppenheimer asked me who I thought would make a good replacement. Somehow, De Beers did not like Gaolathe probably because they did not find him pliable enough. I replied that it was up to him and the president to decide.

I refrained from recommending Nchindo basically for two reasons. Firstly, I did not believe in cronyism. Secondly, I did not think Nchindo would best serve the interests of the country as MD of Debswana as to me he was liable to further the interests of De Beers more than those of our government.

Reading this, he will probably feel betrayed even if he did land the post anyway. But to me there was a very thick line between merit and the sentimentalism of friendship.

The Debswana package was a generous one. Gaolathe's displeasure on realising that there would be no further lease of life for him at Debswana was plain. It is small wonder therefore, that he dug in for a further six months, not that he was daring anybody to remove him, but because he was being redeployed to the Bank of Botswana as its governor.

This was a more prestigious posting even than that of Debswana MD, but it was high in glamour and short on prerequisites. Gaolathe was very conscious as to the deficit he would suffer upon moving; a salary cut of almost half of what he was getting at Debswana.

Unfortunately, his prayer for redress in terms of a top-up through a presidential directive was not answered for fear that this would create a precedent. As an economist, he would find ways of economising on the relatively modest sum he earned at the Central Bank, though a 50 percent cut in one's emoluments was certainly not a joke.

After the exit of Gaolathe, enter, once again, Nchindo. From that point on, he was never seen at Mana House. In fact, he made no initiative whatsoever to socialise with me again. He had got what he wanted and I was once again irrelevant. His gesture did not upset me in the least, as I had played no part whatsoever in his return to Debswana.

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 I 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.

What beneficiation could do to our economy was well illustrated in countries such as India, Belgium, Thailand and Israel, to name but a few, none of which mined a single diamond stone. One did not need a degree in economics to appreciate this possibility. All one needed was to know how to read and, though superfluous, to travel to see for oneself if still a doubting Thomas.

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 that 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 actually more of a 'De Beerian', if there is such a term, than otherwise.

On one or two occasions when I sent a fact-finding team to witness the viability of beneficiation overseas, Nchindo and other De Beers' officials wedged themselves in the delegations and basically hijacked the mission: on one such trip to India, he took charge and saw to it that the team was steered away from those cutting and polishing firms that were the industry model and shepherded through those that were on the fringes, its ragtag and bobtail.

Naturally, few, if any, people on the trip would have anything good to say about their experiences, as the image imprinted on their minds was not a representative one but a stage-managed one in the manner of a movie director's on-set tricks. Tragically, no one read past this chicanery.

Whatever Nchindo and De Beers said and did was embraced at face value, whereas my contentions to the contrary were scoffed at in a manner that suggested that I had probably gone off my rocker. The combined report by the fact finding team in regard to the establishment of a diamond cutting and polishing industry in Botswana was negative, whereas reports by individual members of the team, particularly those of Blackie Marole, Ian Kirby and Todd Majaye, were positive.

If our differences had been restricted purely to the pros and cons of whether we should beneficiate or not, matters would certainly never have gone beyond the pale. Unfortunately, our relations soured to a point where we nearly dragged each other to the courts. It was all Nchindo's fault when he resorted to rash and perjurious imputations.

On September 29, 1997, he told me that Lev Leviev, the diamond industry mogul, had promised Mogolori Modisi, Quett Masire's cousin, a substantial pecuniary reward in the event that he was given a licence to cut and polish diamonds in Botswana.

Modisi had travelled to Russia and, having seen how brisk the diamond cutting and polishing business was there, and the effect it had on employment creation, he had tried to convince President Masire to adopt a more positive and enthusiastic stance towards beneficiation. It was this gesture, apparently, that Nchindo was alluding to.

Whilst I did not press for further substantiation of Nchindo's allegations, I did not deem them in the least credible. In the first place, they were coming from a man who was inherently opposed to beneficiation. Secondly, I thought he seemed too certain for a man who was not party to the alleged deal. If Modisi indeed had been made such an offer, I did not see him, never mind Leviev, advertising it to the world at large. Only Modisi and Leviev would have been privy to it. How on earth then did Nchindo come to know about it?

My suspicions were confirmed when I became the target of a similar accusation. I was tipped off by a local lawyer who told me that Nchindo was going around telling people that the reason why I was so fixated on beneficiation and why I had invited foreign investors, particularly Lev Leviev, was because I had been promised kickbacks if I facilitated their securing of licences.

I was that vulnerable, so it was said, because my businesses were in dire straits and this mega commission would give them the lift they needed.

On March 28, 1998, I confronted Nchindo in the National Assembly lounge and challenged him to confirm or deny the twaddle he was spreading about me.

Nchindo was impassioned in his denials, saying he had not said anything of the sort. In any case, the only people with whom he discussed matters relating to diamonds were Black Marole, who at the time was my permanent secretary, and Vice President, Festus Mogae.

He nevertheless reiterated what he had said about Modisi and pointed to that as the probable cause of the mix-up. That, unfortunately, did not wash, for he had made the same allegations to my sister-in-law, who was a Debswana employee.

For him to convey his suspicions to her suggested he intended his accusation to reach me as there was no way my sister-in-law would have kept quiet about it.

Since he had mentioned Marole and Festus Mogae as his confidantes, I questioned the two over the matter. Mogae simply said he was not surprised at such an assertion from Nchindo because he knew the kind of person he was. Blackie too found the matter way beyond the pale.

I met Nchindo again three days later to make known to him that I had raised the matter with Marole and Mogae and that I was also in the process of seeing the De Beers people about it.

This time Nchindo burst out in a paroxysm of convulsive rage and threatened that he was putting his lawyers, Collins Newman & Co., on the alert with a view to instituting legal action against the attorney who made the slanderous allegations against him, which I found ironic.

If anything, it should have been the other way round. I dared him to go ahead as I had the information on good authority.

It seemed he had been playing tough. He never made good on his promise to sue. When three weeks later I rang Collins Newman & Co. to find out why I had not yet received a subpoena, I was told he had rung to stop them from pursuing the matter. That was how the matter ended. Although I had originally planned to take the matter up with the De Beers officials, I changed course. The futility of such a move was guaranteed, given that Nchindo was the most trusted anchorman for De Beers in Botswana.

Besides, he was a great friend of the guys higher up in the echelons of government, who reposed a great deal of trust in him and basically hung on every word he said.

For instance, during the restructuring of De Beers and Anglo American, which led to the twin companies delisting from the stock markets, Nchindo was mandated to negotiate on behalf of government single-handedly without the knowledge of either the mineral resources minister or the Debswana board, which only learnt of the development in the international press.

Whether the interests of Botswana took precedence over those of De Beers and Anglo American during these negotiations, no one can say for certain.