07/09/2026
BONDING BOTSWANA FOR P20 BILLION FOR A P3.6 BILLION “INVESTMENT”
Batswana are being marched to the slaughterhouse of public finance. We are told to smile, call it “investment,” and hand over P20 billion for schools that should cost P3.6 billion. This is not development. This is not partnership. This is plunder.
Call it what it is. Theft dressed up as a school-building programme. State capture signed in the language of a Public-Private Partnership. A political IOU cashed against the Republic. In 2023, South Africa’s amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism published the “Motifiles.” Those files laid bare an alleged bargain between Mr. Zunaid Moti and Mr. Duma Boko, political funding in exchange for a pipeline into Botswana’s public purse. The courts refused to gag that publication. The record stands.
Today the invoice has arrived, and Batswana will pay it with their wages, their clinics, their children’s future, and, if this government has its way, with twenty years of national bo***ge. Unemployment is grinding families into dust. The cost of living is strangling households. The health system is collapsing in plain sight. Foot-and-mouth disease is tearing through livestock. And what does the UDC Government choose? Not relief. Not competence. Not patriotism. It chooses to fatten one man and his network while the nation goes hungry.
THE FACTS THE GOVERNMENT HOPES YOU WILL NOT READ
The Ministry said no. Then someone overrode the Ministry. In 2025, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, Mr. Tshokologo Alex Kganetsano, stated on record that this Moti deal was “too costly” and had been rejected. That rejection was not a rumor. It was official. Yet the deal is back bigger, hungrier, and dripping with political protection. Who crushed the Ministry’s objection? Who authorized the override? Name them.
The arithmetic is an insult. One pre-fabricated school costs P36 million to build. Under this deal, taxpayers will be bled almost P200 million per school over 20 years. That is a 555% markup. Not a premium. Not a financing cost. A shakedown. Anyone who calls this “value for money” is either lying or unfit to handle a public chequebook.
The scale is an attack on the Republic. One hundred schools are earmarked. Botswana is being bonded for over P20 billion for a P3.6 billion project. That P20 billion does not buy teachers. It does not buy staff. It does not buy electricity, water, or maintenance. It is P16 billion in profit for Moti and his associates, extracted from a people who can barely survive the month. A generation will service this debt so that a private network can feast.
The PPP Policy has been torn up. Botswana’s own PPP Policy demands value-for-money and transparency. This deal fails both tests in daylight. It transfers no real risk to the private party. It hides the paper. It treats the public as an ATM. Policy is not decoration. When government discards it to feed a favored contractor, that is not administration. That is capture.
The company is a fog machine. The “African Hero” entity has no listed directors on the C**A website, an omission so convenient it should have stopped this deal on the first desk it landed on. Meanwhile, a UDC-controlled Gaborone City Council handed over 6 hectares of public land for this so-called investment. Public land, Public debt, Private harvest, and the nation is expected to clap.
If the State needed P3.6 billion, it could have raised it at home, through pension funds, insurers, the private sector, and Gaborone City Council’s own municipal bonds on the Botswana Stock
Exchange, exactly as our PPP Policy provides. That route keeps the money, the risk, and the accountability inside Botswana. Instead, this government chose to chain the country to about P1 billion a year in rentals to Zunaid Moti. That is not heartless by accident. That is the price of political debts being settled with public money. We will not watch in silence while Botswana is sold on the instalment plan.
THE BCP THEREFORE DEMANDS NOW, NOT AFTER THE CONTRACT IS LOCKED
Full disclosure. No more hiding. The Vice President and Minister of Finance must immediately table every agreement, side letter, guarantee, land allocation, and payment schedule between the Government of Botswana and African Hero, before Parliament and before the nation. If the deal is clean, publish it. If they refuse, the country will know why.
A Parliamentary inquiry with teeth. The Public Accounts Committee must convene as a matter of emergency and summon the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Finance, to explain how a deal his Ministry rejected was resurrected and approved. We will not let a budget line become the alibi for a national heist. If Parliament insists there are no funds to convene the special meeting, the BCP will bear the full cost of the special session.
From 14 to 18 September 2026, the BCP will meet civil society, labor, and other patriotic forces to map a national response. This capture must be stopped before it is welded into the next twenty years of the fiscus, and before it cripples the next generation. The spectra of possible money laundering engineered from the highest offices of the State is not a slogan. It is a warning. The damage, immediate, medium-term, and generational, is too grave to “wait and see.” Waiting is how capture wins.
BATSWANA DID NOT VOTE TO BE BILLED FOR SOMEONE ELSE’S POLITICAL DEBT.
Issued by:
Cde Olebile Machete
Secretary for Publicity and Information
