The nation has been losing P1 million a week to fraudsters, and as far as we know, nobody has been punished.
While none other than the President of the republic made the announcement of the theft, for some reason, we have not heard of anybody being hauled to court to answer for what President Ian Khama says are false claims of substantial amounts of money. The President may not have told us how much money has been lost in the scam discovered by the Claims Audit Team, but going by the rate of P1 million a week and the President's characterisation of it as "substantial," little is left to the imagination. That is why it is surprising that the nation can lose such colossal sums and nothing seems to be happening in the way of sackings and due process. For Khama to include the discovery of the fraud at the Department of Building and Electrical Services (DBES) in his State of the Nation Address, the evidence must be solid, replete with a paper trail of who claimed what fraudulently. Presumably, the officers, the consultants and the contractors involved in the scam are known, and must have been for some time. Yet, other than the audit Khama talked about, we have not heard of any clean-up of the Augean Stables that must be DBES. After the audit team unearthed the grand larceny, the logical step would have been to bring in the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC), suspend the officers involved and blacklist the consultants and contractors in question. Because it has attracted the attention of the President, we expected big heads to roll. But in a classic case of lip-service, Khama chose to talk about delayed payments caused by tighter controls at DBES while the felons continued to fleece the fiscus with impunity. He was long on talk about what would be done in the future, instead of what is being done now to punish the rogues responsible for the loss of the millions. Interestingly, in his expos, Khama only mentioned consultants and contractors. But we know that in matters of corruption, it takes two to tango. The thieving consultants and contractors can never succeed in their false claims without the connivance and cooperation of well-positioned officers at DBES. At the very least, certain key people at DBES must be guilty of gross negligence if the country has been losing a million a week under their watch. And from what the President said, if the audit team had not been sent in to probe DBES, the gravy train of theft would still be running because officers at the department were either sleeping on the job or participating in the rip-off. Is it any wonder then that while grand corruption is going on at DBES, DCEC is busy dragging small fry elsewhere to court over peanuts?
