In the famous praise poem for that holiest of animals- the cow - it is said that the beast is no mere creature, but a god. The poet deepens the reverence by calling it kotla-masiela: the saviour of orphans, the father to the fatherless. In Setswana cosmology, the cow is not livestock. It is security. It is dignity. It is continuity.

 

If the cow is a god to a Motswana, then the institution where its latent value is finally realised, the Botswana Meat Commission, must be something close to a holy enterprise.

 

For the first time in a generation, that sanctum shows signs of being restored.

The turning of the tide

 

The Botswana Meat Commission has recorded an unaudited profit of P54.3 million for the financial year ended 31 December 2025, a startling reversal from the P132 million loss suffered just twelve months prior. Addressing the Lobatse Town Council this week, BMC Chief Technical Advisor Mr Oabona Ramotshwara did not mince words: the Commission has crossed the threshold from “recovery” into “stabilisation.”

 

The figures lend weight to his confidence. At the Lobatse Plant, the slaughter lines processed 62 204 cattle in 2025, up from 51 070 in 2024, a 22 per cent surge that suggests farmers are returning to the fold, their trust slowly being repaired. Plant utilisation has climbed from a moribund 49 per cent to 60 per cent, the machinery finally humming with the purpose of an enterprise that remembers how to work.

 

Behind this resurrection lies a particular alchemy: stronger margins wrested from better market positioning; tighter cost control that has staunched the haemorrhaging of previous years; faster cash conversion that has improved liquidity; and enhanced farmer incentives that have drawn cattle back from private buyers. Historical arrears totalling P698 million, debts that had festered like untreated wounds, have been cleared.
But to understand the weight of this P54 million, one must remember the depth of the hole from which it was excavated.

When the covenant broke
For generations of cattle farmers across the thirstlands and the veld, from the sandveld of Ngamiland to the hardpan of the Central District, BMC was more than a parastatal. It was a covenant: that cattle delivered would be paid for; that the long, patient labour of herding would find its reward in European markets; that rural livelihoods would rest on something sturdier than hope or seasonal rain.

 

Over the last ten years, that covenant steadily frayed into broken promises.

 

The decline was neither sudden nor singular, but a grinding erosion marked by haemorrhaging losses, unpaid farmers, and eventual technical insolvency. By 2018 and 2019, farmers across cattle-producing regions began experiencing payment delays that stretched from weeks into months. By late 2019, BMC’s arrears exceeded P160 million, with some producers waiting in limbo for payment after delivering cattle that had already been processed, shipped, and consumed in foreign markets.

 

This was not merely an accounting problem. It was a rupture of trust. For communal farmers, cattle sales pay school fees at the beginning of term; they cover medical bills when the sick must be rushed to the clinic; they keep households afloat during drought years when crops fail. Delayed payments sent shockwaves through villages and family survival strategies.
The defining moment came in 2020, when government formally stated in the national budget speech that BMC was technically insolvent, despite capital injections approaching P1 billion over preceding years. The language was clinical, unvarnished: structural failure. The holy enterprise had been profaned by mismanagement and inertia.

The long road back
In response, government announced reforms that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. BMC would be converted from a statutory commission into a company under the Companies Act. Its monopoly position, that sacred protection that had insulated it from competition for generations, would be dismantled. A meat industry regulator would be established. A management company would be appointed to stabilise operations from April 2020.

 

Yet reform proved slower than the rhetoric of transformation. For years, BMC remained in limbo, suspended between the old world of monopoly privilege and the uncertain new world of competition, kept alive by fiscal transfusions but unable to stand independently. By 2022, accumulated losses exceeded P1.5 billion. The Commission was surviving, but it was not yet recovering.

 

The P54 million profit announced this week marks the end of that limbo. Alongside the turnaround, BMC has embarked on capital projects aimed at reducing reliance on the volatile logic of raw beef exports: a Meat Value Addition Plant, revitalisation of the tannery, and plans for multi-species abattoirs in Gaborone and Tsabong.

The shadow of the virus
But even as the balance sheet turns green, the ancient enemy remains, reminding all that stabilisation is not yet security.

 

The recent outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) has already slowed operations in 2026. Although the Lobatse abattoir maintains a capacity to slaughter 600 cattle per day, the facility currently stands underutilised, caught in the protocols of disease containment.

The Commission finds itself in a cruel paradox. While the Department of Veterinary Services has granted permission for local slaughter, BMC is architecturally designed as an export facility — its cold chains, its certifications, its very existence calibrated toward foreign markets. Local slaughter alone cannot sustain the enterprise; it is like trying to feed a lion on grass. The Commission now waits for the completion of vaccination and surveillance processes before export operations can resume.

 

The P54 million profit, hard-won through discipline and reform, now hangs in the balance, threatened by a microscopic agent that moves through the herds with indifferent malice.

More than a parastatal
BMC’s tentative resurrection is more than a story about beef or balance sheets. It is a mirror of Botswana’s broader struggle to reform strategic state institutions without dismantling the social functions they were created to serve — the tension between efficiency and equity, between commercial discipline and rural protection.

 

The stabilisation is real. But its survival will depend not on single-year improvements, but on sustained discipline: governance discipline that prevents a return to the laxity of the past; disease control that keeps international markets open; market diversification that reduces dependence on fickle European demand; and the political will to complete reforms long acknowledged but repeatedly delayed.

 

For farmers standing at the kraal gates, the test remains simple: timely payment, predictable operations, and a reliable market that honours the sacredness of the cow.
For government, the Botswana Meat Commission remains what it has always been a measure of whether the state can honour its promises to those who have, for generations, trusted the cow to carry them through. The kotla-masiela deserves no less. ENDS