Council business move good but...

| Tuesday February 4, 2014 15:19

This is a welcome initiative through which councils will be able to unlock the business potential in the district, town and city councils.

Just last week, the Francistown City Council established a company to do business on its behalf. This week it is reported that Gantsi District Council has also decided to set up business operations. Many more will follow suit as we move forward.

We are fully aware that there is a lot of corruption, inefficiency and carelessness in government, district councils included. It is our belief that these companies will be in the form of parastatals, at district level of course.

But of late parastatals have been plagued by scandals leading to a far from clean image.  Public business institutions such as the Botswana Development Corporation (BDC) and Botswana Meat Commission (BMC), among others conjure up negativity.

As the district councils establish companies, we are a bit skeptical about their capacity to manage bilateral relations with foreign municipalities and others.

 We caution against a repeat of corruption and bad business decisions that have besieged parastatals such as BDC, BMC and others where there will be no one held accountable for the loss of public funds due to theft and mismanagement. The fear is that high-ranking officials in councils may be positioning themselves to benefit from these companies through dubious routes. It is imperative that the councils formulate policies to make accountability, and transparency a compulsory culture, unlike the previous scenarios that existed with the two companies aforementioned in this article. 

We hope that councillors, and members of the public will be furnished with company financial records whenever they require them, and that these records shall be made public at a specified period during the year. The same practice is applied elsewhere in the country, where companies listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange are required, or rather, obliged to publish audited account books every year for stakeholders to scrutinise in their own time. A similar exercise is being done in parastatals through annual reports, but the latter exercise is not enough, and a lot still needs to be done.

Finally, it is a good thing for councils to come up with initiatives, in their endeavour to improve service to their customers. It is our conviction that if done properly, and with due diligence and integrity, the partnerships can take us a few miles in the right direction.

                                              Today’s thought

'Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law nor democratic government

 will function properly.'

                                                   – Vaclav Havel