Almost all the livestock procurement tenders were not done in a transparent manner, the Reatile Committee has heard. According to the Purchasing and Procurement Manager of the Botswana Meat Commission (BMC), Babi Kgafela, over 90 percent of the livestock procurement tenders that the BMC entered into were dubious.The Reatile parliamentary committee is investigating the collapse of the Botswana Meat Commission (BMC) and the decline of the cattle industry in Botswana. Kgafela told the committee when he joined the BMC in 2011, a lot of transactions that passed through his office raised eyebrows. He said changes, especially at the leadership level of the BMC, were taking place at an alarming rate.
Kgafela told the committee that even though his office was the custodian of the Procurement Policy of the BMC, the livestock procurement sector, which was headed by Clive Marshall, made livestock procurement transactions under dubious circumstances."Most of the transactions I would not say were rational, hence they were not transparent," he added.His efforts to raise the alarm on the anomalies were met with resistance and none of the BMC leadership was willing to take action, Kgafela emphasised.He said in his first six months in office, agents of the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) visited to investigate how the procurement livestock sector was conducting its affairs."DCEC came through to my office and took away some files ... and those files are still with them," he went on. "I cooperated with them and gave out information in a bid to help DCEC investigate issues related to livestock procurement."
