11 Oct 2015

The Office of President says it has “once more noted with concern the tendency on the part of some in the private media to constantly seek to undermine public confidence in not only the Presidency, but the institutional structures of the State as a whole through the continued publication of blatant fabrications and outright lies, as well as a steady stream innuendo.”

A press release from the office states that “an especially extreme example of this pattern can be found on the front page of this week’s (7/10/15) edition of the Botswana Gazette newspaper, which makes the extraordinary claim that P279 billion in State revenue was somehow lost during Khama’s term in office while further stating that investigations suggest that P42 billion alone may have been lost in 2015 owing to corruption and money unaccounted for by government.”

It says  that the text of the article, authored by the newspaper’s editor, fails to provide a single shred of evidence to support such a monstrous looting of state revenue.

“We are of the view that the brazen level of the Gazette’s premeditated deceit is in this case reflected in the simple fact that the total accumulated revenue and grant received by government from April 2008 to April 2015 was P273, 025 billion, while total expenditures and net lending was P 285,451 billion,” the office says. 

Furthermore, the release says in other words, the Gazette’s editor would wish the world to believe that the looting of state coffers amounted to 98 per cent of all expenditure since 2008, implying that government thus spent virtually nothing on salaries, development projects, education, health or security etc during the last seven years. 

It says the absurdity of this allegation under any circumstance is rendered all the more laughable insofar as the government budget is a matter of publicly presented record (e.g. budget session of Parliament), as well as public scrutiny through such oversight bodies as Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the Office of the Auditor General.

“Under the circumstance, we would respectfully suggest to the editor of the Gazette that even the Nazi propagandists understood that a big lie had to be at least somewhat plausible, unlike his newspaper’s front page,” it says. Ends