Palapye Follies

Half way between Botswana’s two biggest  towns of Gaborone and Francistown lies the otherwise unremarkable village of Palapye. It has become a common place to stop for coffee en route to Botswana’s ‘north’and  is also the cross roads to Serowe, which leads to the  Orapa diamond mine and eventually the Okavango delta. But Palapye is more than just a physical cross roads, it is also a metaphorical cross roads between what was once a successful administration and increasingly failed set of policies. The BagammaNgwato (or more commonly Bamangwato) chieftaincy has been dominant in Botswana’s affairs  for as long as anyone can remember and is the chieftaincy of the current president Major General Seretse  Khama Ian Khama and his illustrious father Sir Seretse Khama, the father of the nation. Both Khama the younger and the elder were kings of the Bamangwato.  Three of the four presidents of post-independence Botswana were Bamangwato.

It would then not be surprising that the Bamangwato royalty and elite would tend to concentrate so much of the development of Botswana in and around their traditional heartland but in Botswana that concentration has resulted in a strange anomaly that makes Palapya worth a stop if one is interested in what is widely seen as the ‘least corrupt country in Africa’. Palapya and its infrastructure projects stands as testimony as to what Botswana’s is now doing with its massive diamond wealth. Palapya is a living thriving testimony to folly, ineptitude and probably corruption.

Taking a tour of Palapya’s infrastructure is a fascinating lesson of what can go wrong when policy making stops being based on sound analysis and the most basic question of whether a project is in the nation’s best interests, to one where infrastructure policy is developed is determined by the ‘Economics of 10%’ ie how much of a kick back one can get. 

If you are travelling from Gaborone north then the best place to start is the Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) . It would seem in this day and age when the entire international community is telling every developing country to send ever more children to university that building a second and technical university is somehow a bad idea is almost heresy. But given the jobless growth in Botswana and when one considers that Botswana already has one of the most expensive post-secondary educations system in Africa then perhaps spending another P500 million on  the first phase of the BIUST construction might not have been prudent at the time it was begun in 2009. This is especially so given that graduates from the nation’s other university , the University of Botswana, are finding almost no employment and are, in ever larger numbers surviving  through low paying internships.

Continuing north is the now infamous power station , Moropule B. This was a USD 1.7 billion World bank/African development bank/ China funded project that was designed to be completed by 2013 and was intended to ween Botswana from it’s almost complete dependence on electricity imports from South Africa. The project never worked properly because those in power decided to choose the company which ultimately built the power plant, ChinaNational Electric Corporation,   a company which had never built a power station as big as this. The then Chinese Ambassador to Botswana, Ding Xiaowen, in 2009 had reportedly advised  then Minerals and Energy Minister Ponatshego Kedikilwe that CNEC was not qualified for the job and yet Kedikilwe still went ahead with the company.  The ambassador suggested that there were other Chinese firms tendering that had considerably more experience in such projects. The project has been a complete disaster and the Minister of Minerals, Mr Kitso Mokaila , has recently mooted the possibility of selling the power plant to the private sector while still talking of renewing the old power plant at Moropule A.

The most disastrous piece of infrastructure in Palapye is not to be seen but is under the village. The North South Water Carrier I constructed in the 1990’s was a pipeline that was supposed to bring water from the relatively water rich NE part of Botswana in the Limpopo basin to the water poor capital of Gaborone. The only problem was that someone decided to build the water pipeline with  fiber-glass pipe, which according to water engineers, is a complete no-no for high pressure water transmission which is almost invariably built with steel and concrete.  It appears that the well know reason why fiberglass was chosen was because one particular head of state, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, had financial interests in the company which built the fiber glass pipe. The North South water carrier cost USD 1.2 billion ( P12 billion at the current exchange rate).

In the current two year drought in Botswana where the Gaborone dam is empty and the capital relies on the North South water carrier it fails regularly and Gaborone sits without both electricity and water. The government is now building North South Water Carrier II which will bring water from the Dipthong dam through Palapye to Gaborone. Hopefully this pipeline which is scheduled to be completed by 2020 will be made of sturdier stuff.

But the Palapye follies do not end with the power station that has never worked at capacity, the pipeline that does not carry water much of the time or the university that will add to the next generation of Botswana’s unemployed. Travel further north and at least two other infrastructural disasters loom on Palapye’shorizon. The oddest is the huge semi-finished tower and factory structure that was supposed to be part of the country’sonly glass factory. This was a project that was developed by the Botswana Development Corporation and is a monument to failed beneficiation and to the inept gaggle of policy makers who ran the institution before they were removed.

Botswana policy makers, reasoning that it has all the basic ingredients in country for making float glass(sand, soda ashdolomite,limestone, andsaltcake) and hence a factory seemed an obvious beneficiation exercise. The only missing ingredient was good governance. The BDC contracted with a Chinese company Shanghai Fengyue Glass which, according to a parliamentary report that was subsequently suppressed because the Minister of Finance, Kenneth Motambowho was at the time the MD of BDC sued parliament and had the report suppressed. The building contractors were fully paid before the contract was completed and millions were lost. The total is estimated publicly to be about P1.5 billion though the initial cost of the plant was P800.

Travelling further north along the main road to Francistown past the ghost glass factory is, on the right, is the regional police station at Palapye which stood empty for two years because of gross construction errors and stands are stark testimony to the nation’s gigantamania. It is a huge three story building with scores of police houses and recreation facilities. The total cost of  construction was P150  million in 2014. Given the  enormous size of the police facility one could believe that  the Bamangwato area which it serves was in the midst of huge crime wave. The size of the police station is large even by Botswana’s standards and remains largely empty at present.

The most interesting thing about Palapye is not the concentration of failed, foolish and irrational   projects in such a small village but the fact that despite the billions of pula that have been wasted, the international community, which funded so many of these, continues to religiously repeat the same dogma about Botswana being well managed and having low levels of corruption. This is in the face of so much  mounting evidence to contrary which is concentrated in such a small place. It takes a three hour drive from Gaborone to see this litany of  failure and malfeasance that is found in Palapye.

Ideas frequently outlive the circumstances that create them.  While it was once true that  Botswana had limited corruption and good infrastructure implementation under Sir SeretseKhama, but things have gone downhill and few Batswana in Gaborone who now believe there is such a thing as a major (or even minor) project that is implemented without a back-hander. But Batswana will say nothing of all this because they know that the law is not meant for the rich and powerful and they will get away with what has been done in Palapyeand elsewhere with complete impunity. And as all Batswana know from their own Tswana metaphor that, ‘if you complain too much the lions will eat you’.

These are  the views of Professor Roman Grynberg and not necessarily those of UNAM where he is employed.