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.
