It began, as these things often do, with a sealed door and a letter marked confidential. What has unfurled since is a tangled contest in which the machinery of Botswana’s state – its spies, its tax collectors and its police – stands accused of being pressed into service in a bruising commercial quarrel over tobacco.
At the heart of the affair is a single document, a letter dated 7 July 2026 and bearing the signature of Directorate of Intelligence and Security (DIS) Director General Peter Magosi. Titled, with bureaucratic economy, “Request for Assistance,” it asked that a bonded warehouse tied to Riotrade Enterprises (Pty) Ltd be sealed while the agency pursued what it described as an intelligence-gathering operation.
Securing the contents of this bonded warehouse is an integral part of this intelligence collection.
That sentence, spare and declarative, has become the fulcrum of a widening dispute. It places the country’s premier intelligence agency squarely on the record, seeking the padlocking of a private company’s stock of raw tobacco – and it has prompted uncomfortable questions about how far the DIS reached into a feud among rival interests in the industry, and whether other arms of the state were drawn in behind it.
A lawyer’s warning
A prominent Gaborone attorney, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter, told WeekendPost that his firm was readying legal action over what he characterized as unlawful conduct by the DIS.
It is true that, in due course, our law firm will expose the alleged illegal activities that the agency is involved in.
The lawyer alleged that the intelligence agency had enlisted other law-enforcement bodies – the Botswana Police Service (BPS) and the Botswana Unified Revenue Service (BURS) among them – in a broader struggle involving tobacco companies. His firm, he said, intended to sue all three. Officials at BURS and the police, he claimed, had acknowledged a role in matters whose full contours they did not themselves understand.
His account then turned darker. The firm, he said, had been placed under surveillance, prompting an increase in its security. There had been, he claimed, attempts by unidentified people to break into its offices – intrusions he suspected might involve DIS operatives. These are allegations, untested in court, and the agency has not publicly responded to them.
The businessman and the seventeen-year-old claim
The confrontation traces back to June and to a Riotrade-linked businessman identified in court papers as Danda.
According to those documents, Danda was arrested in Gaborone by Senior Superintendent Ranchi Olebile of the Lobatse Police over an allegation of obtaining money by false pretences – a matter said to be some seventeen years old. He reportedly offered to repay P18,000 to the complainant, who subsequently withdrew the case. Even so, he spent the night in custody.
Police, his court papers say, told him he was wanted by security operatives. An arrangement was reportedly made for Danda, who was unwell, to be seen by a doctor. Instead, he claims, he was driven to the DIS offices in Sebele and detained there until late at night. There, he alleges, officers – including one identified as Nkwane – threatened and assaulted him while demanding the passwords to two mobile telephones that had been seized. He was eventually released, he says, but the phones remained in the agency’s keeping.
These remain Danda’s allegations, set out in legal filings and not yet adjudicated.
From the interrogation room to the warehouse
The quarrel soon migrated from the person of the businessman to the premises of his business.
On 10 July, acting under the authority of Acting Commissioner General Phodiso P. Valashia, a BURS official issued a preservation notice that sealed Riotrade’s bonded warehouse and froze the movement of its raw tobacco. The revenue service leaned on Section 15 of the Customs Act to justify the step.
Danda took the fight to the Lobatse High Court, arguing that BURS had acted unlawfully and that the shutdown was bleeding the company. The financial toll, the company said, was severe: monthly obligations running into millions of pula, including loan repayments, an Absa revolving credit facility, roughly P160,000 in vehicle-loan repayments and about P1 million in monthly tax commitments. Riotrade, its papers added, employs some 120 local workers against a monthly wage bill of approximately P600,000.
A judicial rebuke
The courtroom proved an unforgiving arena for the revenue authority.
On 7 August, Justice Rueben Lekorwe ruled in Riotrade’s favour, finding that “pending clarity” was not a sufficient basis on which to seal the warehouse. He stayed the suspension notice and restored the company’s access to its raw materials so that manufacturing could resume. Riotrade was directed to file a formal review application within 30 days; BURS was ordered to pay the company’s legal costs.
If the ruling settled the immediate question of the warehouse, it did little to quiet the larger storm.
A P3 million reckoning
On 17 August, Danda’s lawyers served a Statutory Notice of Intention to Sue the DIS and the police, seeking P3.05 million in damages. The claim is itemized: P1 million for alleged unlawful arrest, P1 million for the alleged violation of his constitutional right to privacy, and P1.05 million for the alleged deprivation of property. The State was afforded 30 days to respond.
The document that started it all, meanwhile, retains its gravitational pull. Whatever disputes remain over who did what to whom, the Magosi letter leaves little ambiguity on one point: it puts the DIS, in its own words, in the posture of an intelligence agency asking that a tobacco company’s bonded warehouse be sealed as “an integral part” of a secret operation.
What that operation sought, and whether the state agencies now facing legal action overstepped their authority, are questions that courts – and, perhaps, the public record the aggrieved lawyer has promised to open – have yet to answer.
The DIS, BURS and the Botswana Police Service had not issued public responses to the specific allegations at the time of writing.
