An investigation by News&All has revealed how the Air Botswana board failed to carry out the most basic due diligence before approving a remuneration package of about P372,000 a month for its General Manager, Bao Mosinyi.
At the centre of the controversy is a November 2025 remuneration report prepared by a consultancy company, People Connections. Shockingly, the report was commissioned by the regulator Civil Aviation Authority of Botswana (CAAB), not Air Botswana, to compare an offer from Air Botswana with the remuneration Mosinyi was supposedly receiving as CAAB chief executive.
The consultancy put Mosinyi’s CAAB total cost to company at P372,943.70 a month, against an Air Botswana offer of P319,442.60. It attributed the difference mainly to housing and vehicle benefits. Mosinyi’s predecessor, Lulu Rasebotsa’s salary was around P175,000.
The report then recommended that Air Botswana adopt the housing and car benefits Mosinyi enjoyed at CAAB and review other allowances to bring the proposed package into line with his CAAB terms. News&All has however established Mosinyi’s salary at CAAB to have been rather, around P170,000 not the P372,000 as implied by the report.
That puts the Air Botswana board’s due diligence at the heart of the matter. Did the board independently verify what Mosinyi was actually earning at CAAB before using the figure as the benchmark for his new package? Air Botswana failed respond to our inquiries regarding this anomaly.
News&All put that question, and others, directly to the Air Botswana and CAAB on August 3, 2026. Neither Air Botswana nor CAAB responded despite acknowledgement of receipt.
News&All has been informed that Mosinyi’s actual CAAB remuneration was substantially lower than the P372,943.70 stated in the People Connections report. Both government institutions need to explain why the figure appeared in a report used in negotiations over the executive’s new public-sector package. The report itself records that Air Botswana was loss-making and had not made a profit for several years, while CAAB was described as a profit-making parastatal.
That silence leaves unanswered a particularly awkward question. News&All has been informed that Mosinyi’s actual CAAB remuneration was substantially lower than the P372,943.70 stated in the People Connections report. Both government institutions need to explain why the figure appeared in a report used in negotiations over the executive’s new public-sector package. The report itself records that Air Botswana was loss-making and had not made a profit for several years, while CAAB was described as a profit-making parastatal.
It also noted that the Air Botswana bonus would depend on the airline making a profit. Yet the report’s recommendations were directed at closing the gap between the two packages. Among them was the adoption of CAAB’s housing and car benefits. The consultancy also said Mosinyi’s CAAB package included a company Land Cruiser GX, fully maintained and insured by CAAB, a P30,000-a-month housing benefit and a P3,000 monthly mobile-phone allowance. The central governance question is whether the board of a loss-making state-owned airline had a sufficiently robust, independent and documented process for deciding how much public money that executive should receive.
News&All asked which organisations it used as comparators and how they compared with Air Botswana in revenue, workforce, complexity and financial performance. It was also asked whether the airline’s profitability, operational performance and dependence on government support were considered. Those are material considerations when benchmarking executive pay.
But the more troubling governance questions extend beyond Air Botswana.
Why was CAAB, a state aviation regulator, paying for a consultancy exercise designed to assess and recommend improvements to an employment offer being made by another state-owned enterprise to its own chief executive?CAAB did not answer. That leaves two state-owned entities refusing to explain the chain of decisions surrounding the remuneration of one executive. Air Botswana did not independently test the information before committing itself to the package.
A board does not discharge its fiduciary responsibilities merely by accepting a report placed before it. Where public money is involved, the evidence underpinning a major executive remuneration decision matters. So does independence. So does the management of conflicts. The questions sent to both institutions were specific, documented and capable of straightforward answers. They chose not to respond.
