It began, as many crises do, with something mundane: a government computer system that had simply grown tired.
For years, the platform that sits at the beating heart of the state’s finances – the Government Accounting and Budgeting System, known across the civil service simply as GABS – had processed the nation’s payments, tracked the expenditure of every ministry vote, and quietly kept the machinery of government solvent.
It is a subsidiary of the larger Financial Management Information System, the digital ledger through which public money moves before it reaches contractors, pensioners, teachers and tax refunds.
Then, in July 2023, the system began to falter. It slowed. It had to be rebooted, again and again, each restart a small gamble with the integrity of the nation’s books. What followed, investigators now allege, was not a repair operation but the opening act of an elaborate scheme – one that a former Minister of Transport and Communications, once among the most powerful figures in the governing party, now finds himself accused of orchestrating from the shadows.
The state, according to the investigation, may have lost close to P1.5 billion to the manipulation of the very system meant to safeguard it.
a Fix That Never Came
The official record shows that the government did what governments are supposed to do. In August 2023, a troubleshooting team was assembled under the chief systems analyst, a career civil servant who had inherited the problem from a predecessor. The team was deliberately broad: government engineers with varied specialisations, working alongside technicians from the multinational corporation that had both manufactured the hardware and written the software the system ran on. The logic was unimpeachable – who better to diagnose a machine than the company that built it?
But before those experts could deliver a verdict, the Permanent Secretary intervened.
On August 22, 2023 – the same day the internal team was still finding its footing – the Permanent Secretary engaged a private technology company to take over the GABS problem. The arrangement, investigators say, bore none of the hallmarks of legitimate government procurement. There were no terms of reference. There was no contract. There was no timeline, no work plan, no schedule of deliverables. There was only a company, granted the keys to the state’s financial nerve centre, and a steady stream of payments flowing outward.
“This meant they directed everything that had to be done,” the investigation file notes, describing a firm that answered to no written mandate yet exercised total control over a system through which the nation’s money flowed.
The minister’s man
The director of that engaged company was no stranger to power.
He had once been an employee of a firm that belonged to the former Minister of Transport and Communications – a company now liquidated. And when he arrived to “fix” GABS, he did not come alone. He brought a team of five, installing himself as technical leader and demanding that his associates be granted virtual private network access to begin work immediately. That access, investigators note, handed the group full remote control of the system.
They were, the file states plainly, appointed unprocedurally and without ever being vetted. Evidence gathered by investigators suggests the Permanent Secretary and the former minister had resolved between themselves to bring these men in.
The paperwork, when it came, arrived backwards. A newly appointed director of the government’s shared digital services department; who took office on September 1, 2023, by which point the private firm was already entrenched on site; was used to manufacture legitimacy after the fact. A memorandum dated September 22 requested the direct appointment of a company that had, in reality, been working inside the system for a month already.
A server nobody needed
The technicians, investigators found, lacked the capacity to solve the problem they had been hired to solve – yet were paid handsomely regardless.
The original manufacturer had already identified the true culprit: the system’s software had been so heavily customised over the years that it had become the source of its own affliction. The manufacturer proposed a solution. It was never implemented. Instead, the engaged company insisted the fault lay with the server itself, and recommended that a new one be leased.
The manufacturer objected. Its engineer sent follow-up communications warning, in explicit terms, of the risks of relying on second-hand servers, and submitted both a solution plan and a quotation. Both were ignored.
At a recorded September 2023 meeting, investigators say, the Permanent Secretary allowed the private contractor to chair the proceedings – a man who was neither a government employee nor a disinterested party, but a direct commercial competitor of the manufacturer whose advice he was overriding.
The server was leased anyway, sourced through a South African supplier. The price told its own story. The government was charged roughly 1.5 million Rand for a machine that open-source market information valued at little more than 110,000 Rand – a markup of more than thirteenfold. When the system finally locked its users out for three days one November, investigators would later hear it was because the rent on that server had gone unpaid, and the leasing company had reached in remotely and switched off the state’s access.
Following the money
If the technical failures raised suspicion, the financial trail hardened it.
Investigators established that the former minister and the private contractor were not merely former colleagues. They were joint shareholders and directors of a separate asset-holding company. They had co-owned the very firm engaged to fix GABS; a partnership from which the minister quietly resigned only weeks after the Permanent Secretary handed that firm its direct appointment.
The bank records deepened the picture. A transfer of 20,000 Pula moved from the engaged company’s account to the former minister’s personal account in September 2022; precisely when the firm had secured its foothold in the ministry. Separately, an analysis of the Permanent Secretary’s own bank accounts revealed cash deposits, made on scattered dates, totalling more than one million Pula.
A whistle-blower’s statement, marked as an exhibit in the case file, describes a meeting captured on an audio recording in which the former minister allegedly instructed the Permanent Secretary on how the troubleshooting should proceed – and then instructed him to ensure the matter “did not come back to him.”
The warnings that went unheeded
Perhaps the most damning detail is that the alarm had already been sounded from within.
A senior government finance official, himself later implicated, had been summoned by the anti-corruption authorities and formally warned against both the appointment of the private firm and the procurement of the servers. He proceeded anyway. He travelled personally with the contractor to acquire the equipment from a regional supplier. The servers, when they arrived, proved obsolete.
The collateral damage rippled outward. Payments were delayed. The generation of statutory tax reports required by the national revenue service was disrupted when the system was withheld. The anonymous source who first raised the alarm offered a chilling interpretation: that the syndicate’s true objective was not merely theft, but the deliberate financial destabilisation of the government itself.
The reckoning
There is, in the end, a bitter irony at the centre of this affair. After the anti-corruption authorities intervened, the original manufacturer was brought back in. It is now, investigators report, successfully running the system on the very same server the contractors had condemned as obsolete – proof, if any were needed, that the problem was never the machine.
One portion of the case has been submitted to the Directorate of Public Prosecutions. All suspects have been formally warned and cautioned. A financial audit is now planned to trace, transaction by transaction, precisely how the money left the government’s coffers.
For a former minister who once helped steer the nation’s transport and communications, the questions are no longer about a slow computer. They are about whether a system built to protect the public purse was quietly re-engineered to empty it – and about how close to 1.5 billion Pula, the property of the people of Botswana, came to vanishing into the space between a broken server and a signature that should never have been given.