Comment: The cancer that is corruption needs to be stopped

As the growing concern over corruption in Botswana continues to swell, we hope that the enactment of the new Public Procurement Act will indeed reduce incidents and cases of corruption.

The Act will come into effect this April.

Officials at the Ministry of Health and Wellness are hopeful that the new law, which will prescribe the registering of procurement officers, will go a long way in ensuring that corrupt practices are eliminated.

For many years Botswana has been cited as the least corrupt country in Africa by Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index ( CPI) and other corruption monitoring bodies. But this seems to no longer be the case.

Despite these favourable ratings from international bodies such as Transparency International, the ruling Botswana Democratic Party and government officials seem to be trapped in corruption.

Now with the advent of COVID- 19, cases of corruption are increasingly growing especially at the Ministry of Health and Wellness, which is entrusted with running and disbursing COVID- 19 funds.

Last week, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health, Grace Muzila admitted that her Ministry has not been faring well in the battle against corruption mainly due to COVID- 19 and the budget attached to the Ministry to fight against the pandemic.

Corruption has entrenched itself in government institutions and this is one area we hope will be addressed by the new Public Procurement Act.

The era of diminishing trust in public institutions and weakened confidence in our public leaders should come to an end.

Indeed, as stated by Muzila, we need to create a corruption- free workplace by equipping officers with the knowledge of their responsibilities in the fight against corruption.

We only hope that this knowledge will be passed to political leaders. President Masisi should make fighting corruption one of his key priorities.

It is also worrying that the same people that are supposed to protect the country’s assets are the same people being implicated in looting the country. Many have lost trust in institutions such as parliament and public leaders.

Members of the public are tired

- tired of hearing the same old narrative - about fighting corruption, while nothing seems to be happening to get rid of it in both private and public institutions.

President Masisi will need to work hard and take initiatives that will enable bodies such as the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime ( DCEC) to effectively deal with corruption.

One such initiative is to give such bodies full independence, including removing them from the supervision of the Office of the President.