The Development Manager model, rolled out to deliver Botswana’s Transitional National Development Plan, operated in an environment almost entirely devoid of statutory oversight, according to a scathing government review. 

The Task Team report found that control of the projects was placed in the hands of the Catalyst Project Team (CPT), an ad hoc structure with no clear legal mandate, which displaced long-established oversight bodies including the Ministry of Finance, the National Planning Commission and the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority. 

This sidelining of statutory institutions created what the report calls an “oversight vacuum,” enabling irregular contract changes, poor cost control and unchecked payments. In several cases, DM contracts were altered from project management to full engineering, procurement and construction without following legal procurement processes. 

The review documented systemic breaches of national policies and laws, including the Competition Act, the Public Financial Management Act and the Citizen Economic Empowerment Policy. These breaches, it warns, left the government heavily exposed to financial and operational risks, undermining the central premise of the DM model — that risk would be transferred to the private sector.

The report calls for the immediate dissolution of the CPT, the reinstatement of statutory oversight bodies and the referral of questionable DM fees to investigative authorities. It further warns that if such institutional weaknesses are not corrected, future large-scale infrastructure projects will remain vulnerable to the same legal and financial pitfalls.