A trend of bad corporate governance characterised by corruption, mismanagement, non-accountability and unethical practices in state owned corporations is disconcerting. The Botswana Meat Commission (BMC) saga epitomize the trouble not only with the countrys public corporation but also with the nation’s agricultural sector, in particular the beef industry. The BMC has been in the news for the wrong reasons and it appears that the crisis continues unabated with profound and deleterious impact on the economy, particularly the cattle industry. BMC has been making loses, hit by exports beef quality issues, envisaged privatization and monopoly issues and feedlots problems inter alia. The troubling problem roots from the traceability of cattle slaughtered by the abattoir. Millions of BWP has been spent on the bolus programme to track and trace cattle but it failed to meet its expectations. The BMC lost on numerous occasions its market to the European Union as a result of untracebility of cattle sold to the EU market. Some of the reasons are found to be internal issues of procurement process, inspections by the DVS which is flawed and mismanagement within the institution. This research relied on secondary data collected from 2008 through to 2012. This data is analysed and some key enablers were suggested and a traceability framework is proposed to eliminate and track anomalies in the supply chain.
Keywords: Beef, Botswana Meat Commission, Sustainability, Traceability
