Long before John Thiite, the former Member of Parliament, and the businessman Nicholas Zakheem were summoned to answer corruption charges at the Broadhurst Magistrates’ Court, the State had already tested – and lost – a central thread of its case in a quieter courtroom hundreds of kilometres away.
The reckoning came not with the clang of handcuffs but in a measured judgment handed down in March 2026, when the Francistown High Court dismissed the government’s attempt to seize a luxury vehicle it insisted was bought with the spoils of a rigged tender. In hindsight, that ruling reads less like a footnote than a warning shot: a demonstration of how a sprawling P272 million case can falter not on the strength of its narrative, but on the frailty of its paperwork.
Justice Tshekiso Tshekiso rejected the Director of Public Prosecutions’ application to forfeit an orange Ford Ranger Double Cab, registration B106BGG, which had been registered to the late Principal Roads Engineer, Sethomo Ronald Tlhagopi. In a rebuke that would later look prophetic, the judge ordered the DPP to pay punitive costs, finding that the State had marched into court without admissible evidence tying the vehicle to the proceeds of crime.
The anatomy of an allegation
At the heart of the matter lay the Tutume Infrastructure Project, a contract valued at P272,378,310.96 for the construction of roads, bridges, stormwater drains and paved parking areas. The tender was awarded to Thiite Rubble Screeners (Pty) Ltd.
According to the DPP’s founding affidavits, Tlhagopi was the official custodian of tender information and is alleged to have drafted a detailed Bill of Quantities – in pencil. The State contended that the engineer passed that pencil draft to Zakheem, rendered as “Zachem” in some court papers, and to Thiite, handing their company a clandestine advantage over rival bidders.
Investigators from the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime alleged a further flourish: that Thiite directed an employee, Claire Chabonela, to trace over the pencil markings in ink before the document was folded into the company’s formal bid. For his cooperation, the DPP alleged, Tlhagopi was rewarded with a P200,000 bribe – money said to have travelled a circuitous route from Thiite Rubble Screeners through Khwee (Pty) Ltd and Serlin Holdings (Pty) Ltd before landing at Barloworld Motor, where it allegedly helped pay for the Ford Ranger.
It was, on paper, a tidy chain of inference. The problem, the court found, was that it could not survive contact with the rules of evidence.
When the paperwork gave way
Looking back, the unravelling was almost clinical. Justice Tshekiso observed that the witness statements the DPP leaned upon – including those attributed to Chabonela, the Ford dealership principal Zecharia Matlho Kepaletswe and the Capital Bank compliance officer Mbakiso Masesane – were typed but neither signed nor sworn. Stripped of proper legal authentication, the judge ruled, they could carry no weight.
Without the attachments, the application did not meet the required standard of proof. The evidence failed to meet the necessary threshold to prove that the motor vehicle at issue was a proceed of crime and a candidate for a civil forfeiture. It stands to fail and does fail.
With that, the scaffolding of the State’s story collapsed. The court could not confirm that the Bill of Quantities had originated with Tlhagopi, that it had passed to Thiite, that Chabonela had rewritten it, or that any of it was tethered to a bribe.
The financial trail fared no better. Bank statements purporting to show transfers from a Thiite Rubble Screeners account – one opened, the DPP said, by Zakheem — to Khwee (Pty) Ltd were ruled inadmissible. Invoking Section 15 of the Evidence in Civil Proceedings Act and Section 5(7) of the Electronic Records (Evidence) Act, the judge noted that electronic banking records require corroborating affidavits from bank officials. None had been filed. The statements, he held, could not come in.
Nor did the deceased engineer’s estate stay silent. Its representatives argued that Zakheem’s own sworn statement established no illicit link whatsoever between Tlhagopi and Thiite Rubble Screeners.
A withdrawal that came too late
Perhaps the most telling episode, in retrospect, was the State’s attempt to retreat. On February 17, 2026, with Justice Tshekiso already drafting his judgment, the DPP moved to withdraw the application altogether.
The estate, represented by the curator bonis Bakgadi Tlhagopi, refused to let the matter quietly disappear, pressing instead for a decision on the merits. Citing Order 47 Rule 1 of the High Court Rules, the judge held that a litigant cannot unilaterally abandon a case already set down without the consent of the other side or the leave of the court. He declared the attempted withdrawal a nullity, dismissed the forfeiture application outright, and ordered the DPP to pay costs on the punitive attorney-and-own-client scale for what he characterised as improper procedural conduct.
The shadow it casts
Now, as the Broadhurst Magistrates’ Court prepares to arraign Thiite and Zakheem, that earlier defeat lingers over the proceedings like a cautionary epigraph. A forfeiture case and a criminal prosecution are governed by different standards and different burdens, and nothing in the March judgment resolves the charges the two men are yet to answer. Both are presumed innocent, and the allegations against them remain untested at a criminal trial.
But the Francistown ruling offered an unusually early and public audit of the evidence underpinning the P272 million affair – and the audit found it wanting. Whether the State has since fortified its proof, or whether the same evidentiary fragilities will resurface in Broadhurst, is the question the coming arraignment will begin to answer.
