The company created to drag Gaborone’s finances into solvency says the city it was meant to rescue is now the obstacle in its path. Allegations of a suspected criminal cartel involving political figures, council officials and a minister threaten to undermine the city’s ambitious investment plans.
Information obtained by WeekendPost suggests that a network of alleged power brokers, council insiders and a minister – whose identity is known to the publication – is accused of obstructing GCIC’s efforts to take control of assets belonging to the Gaborone City Council (GCC).
The dispute has reportedly deepened into a bitter standoff between the council and its investment arm. As tensions rise over the ownership and control of council assets, GCIC is said to have sought help from the Office of the President.
At the centre of the controversy are valuable council assets and land that GCIC is expected to use to generate revenue and help transform the capital.
In a pointed escalation to the Presidential Projects Office, the Gaborone City Investment Company (GCIC) – the commercial entity incorporated to wean the capital’s local authority off government handouts – has accused officials within Gaborone City Council of withholding asset registers, leases and revenue records, stonewalling reforms the Council itself approved, and presiding over a governance breakdown that it says is quietly bleeding public money.
The appeal, authored by GCIC’s chief executive, Kabo Bruno Moitoi, does not mince its language. It asks the Office of the President to compel “full disclosure” of the Council’s books, to unblock the company’s mandate, and to “ensure accountability where acts, omissions, or decisions may have caused financial prejudice to Council, Government, or the public interest.”
At the center of the dispute is a single, startling arithmetic. By GCIC’s own market analysis, outdoor advertising within the Council’s jurisdiction – the billboards, gantries and roadside hoardings that crowd the capital’s arterials – should be worth more than P80 million a year. Council billing, the company reports, has “remained below P2 million,” with actual collections lower still. A gap of that magnitude, GCIC argues, “is too significant to be explained by ordinary administrative inefficiency alone.”
A rescue company meets a locked door
GCIC was incorporated in July 2025, conceived by Council resolution as a strategic answer to a familiar predicament: declining revenues, anemic rate collection, and an unbroken dependence on central-government subventions that the letter calls “neither sustainable nor aligned with national aspirations.” The company became operational only after Moitoi’s appointment in February 2026, followed by the recruitment of its core staff.
Eight months in, the company says it is still knocking on doors that will not open. Repeated requests for the Council’s asset register, commercial-property information, lease agreements and revenue data have, in its telling, “largely not been released.” The effect, GCIC contends, has been to force a reform vehicle into the undignified work of basic forensics – establishing, almost from scratch, what the Council actually owns, who occupies it, and what revenue ought to be flowing in.
“This obstruction materially weakens oversight, delays revenue recovery, and creates a high-risk environment,” the submission states, warning that public assets may continue to be “occupied, used, transferred, or commercially exploited” without transparency, competitive testing or enforceable protection of the public purse.
The missing 535 properties
Where records were absent, GCIC turned to improvised methods of verification: drone surveys, physical counts, market benchmarking, mystery shopping and revenue analysis. The results, it says, were troubling on more than one front.
A Deeds Registry search commissioned by the company turned up roughly 600 properties registered to the Gaborone City Council – a figure wildly at odds with the 65 or so plots the company says it was initially pointed to. Only a handful of leases tied to those properties were later handed over. The yawning discrepancy, GCIC argues, raises the question of whether Council-owned land is “properly recorded, lawfully allocated, leased at market-related values, monitored for compliance, and billed and collected in full.”
The absence of a complete, reconciled asset register, the letter adds, is itself “a critical control failure” – the kind of blind spot that allows public property to slip out of view, go undervalued, or vanish from the billing ledger altogether.
Thin rents, thinner collections
The leases that were produced fared little better under scrutiny. GCIC describes rentals that appear “materially below commercial potential,” termination clauses that could saddle the Council with avoidable liabilities, and allocation processes that do not consistently show evidence of public notice, competitive bidding or value-for-money testing.
On the collections side, the company reports a recovery rate of less than 30 percent – a figure it brands “a serious revenue-performance failure” for an institution already under fiscal strain. GCIC says it built a comprehensive debt-and-revenue strategy and brought in the accounting firm Grant Thornton for independent quality assurance, only to watch implementation stall for want of cooperation from the departments holding the data.
Then there is the matter of priorities. GCIC says it is uneasy that the Council has reportedly leaned toward procuring a revenue-management portal costed at roughly P7 million – before completing the diagnostic groundwork needed to verify data integrity, reconcile debtor records and establish whether governance failures, rather than software, are the real leak. Buying the system first, the company implies, risks paving over the cracks.
A local fight with national stakes
GCIC is careful to frame its grievance as more than a turf war. The pattern it describes – non-disclosure, undervalued assets, weak controls, and commercial arrangements that may not be protecting public value – amounts, in its view, to “a structural governance failure” with implications far beyond one city. Left unresolved, it warns, such practices could “normalise non-disclosure, weaken the authority of Council resolutions,” and deepen the very dependence on government funding that the company was built to end.
Its requests to the Presidential Projects Office are correspondingly expansive: immediate release of the full asset register, lease files, concession records, debtor information and billing data; an independent investigation into the Council’s commercial assets, advertising concessions and procurement choices; the full implementation of GCIC’s mandate; and accountability for any decisions that prejudiced the public interest.
“Without urgent intervention,” the submission concludes, “the reforms expected through GCIC may be neutralised” – and the government may ultimately be left to absorb a financial burden that “could have been avoided through proper disclosure, enforcement, recovery, and accountability.”
The letter was copied to the Council’s General Manager for Commercials and its Head of Legal. The Gaborone City Council had not publicly responded to the allegations at the time of writing.
Gaborone Mayor Oarabile Motlaleng dismissed the cartel allegations in an interview with WeekendPost this week, saying he knew of no criminal network operating within the council.
“To my knowledge, there is no such criminal cartel operating within GCC,” he said.
Motlaleng said the council held substantial land that would be leased to companies and individuals who had submitted applications. He added that the council and GCIC were working to speed up the process so the investment company could begin earning revenue from the leases.
He also rejected suggestions that political affiliation would influence who received land. Applicants, he said, would be assessed on the merits of their proposals, not their party allegiance.
“These leases are not given by party colours. Once the team is convinced about your proposal, you will be given a chance to lease the land,” he said
Motlaleng added that the UDC would not follow what he described as the BDP’s controversial practice of directing services to its own supporters.
He said GCIC was now operational and had taken control of the council’s assets, rejecting claims that the transfer was being obstructed.
“We have recently transferred all assets to our investment company, which I am now proud of,” he said.
The mayor also suggested that the company was beginning to deliver financial results and that residents could soon see significant changes to the city.
“This city is about to change for the good, and the public will be surprised to witness the new look of their own city,” he said.
Planned developments are expected to include major infrastructure projects, such as dual carriageways, which Motlaleng said would reshape the city.
He also said mayors and council chairpersons had recently met in Maun to discuss ways for local authorities to raise revenue independently of the Ministry of Local Government. Gaborone, he added, had become one of the best-performing councils in investment revenue generation—an achievement he described as remarkable.
Asked about reports that GCIC had written to the Office of the President seeking intervention, Motlaleng said he knew of no such letter.
“I am not aware of any complaints or letter written by the investment arm to the Office of the President to intervene,” he said, adding that he would be surprised if one had been sent.
Motlaleng maintained that the council had a cordial relationship with its business arm.
