This appears in the latest Auditor General’s report on community-based natural resources management in Botswana.
The audit warns that the situation could provide a recipe for inter-departmental wrangles resulting in a potential ’sit-back and watch’ mentality by dissatisfied stakeholders.
The report says Botswana Tourism Board has been at the forefront of overseeing tenders for a number of trusts including Nata Conservation, Khwai Development, Tsamama, Seboba Conservation, Mapanda Conservation and Moremi Manonnye Conservation.
“While this might be right by virtue of the fact that BTB is a member of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), it nevertheless became clear from the interviews with officials of the DWNP in their capacity as the Secretariat of TAC, that the TAC was not comfortable with the active role played by the BTB,” according to the report.
The audit says the strongest bone of contention rests on the TAC’s opinion that it appearesas if the BTB has now assumed the TAC’s mandate without the inclusion and input of other TAC members.
“In other words, the BTB was viewed as having adopted a ‘big brother mentality’ and being ‘the TAC’ when it came to issues of tendering. on the other hand, the BTB felt that their actions were justified because most of the TAC members had not been actively involved in the work of the Committee,” the report says.
The audit further says that the above scenario might suggest that the roles of the different members of the TAC might not have been properly defined and agreed by all members concerning tendering for joint ventures.
According to the CBNRM Policy of the Government of Botswana, 2007, “all tendering procedures for the awarding of natural resource use concessions” should be supervised by the TAC, which will provide technical appraisal and analysis of the tender documents.
The role of the TAC (as defined in the Joint Venture Guidelines of 1999) was originally on overseeing the tendering process and operations of the Joint Venture Partnership (JVP).
The TAC’s roles have since been widened and the committee is actively involved in the entire Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM) process, planning and the implementation of the projects.
The audit report also recommends that all the members of TAC should be encouraged and fully engaged in the tendering process so that the committee benefits from the input of all its members.
Management further indicated that the scenario at hand was such that some critical players did not give the programme the attention it deserved, partly due to the fact that the USAID (NRMP), which assisted in establishing CBNRM, is housed at DWNP.
The programme is generally perceived as a wildlife programme.
Tourism Board Is A Bully – Trusts
