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Botswana: Workers Endure Terrifying Lie Detector Tests
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The Voice (Francistown)
22 April 2008
Posted to the web 22 April 2008
Francinah Baaitse
Francistown
This week, employees of Cash Crusaders were reeling with shock after going through a lie detecting testing exercise. They could not get any help from the police as the legal books are said to be silent on polygraphs. Some employees are still struggling to recover from the ordeal.
"It was too odd, too horrifying," said one employee, who would not be named for fear of victimisation. According to the owner of Cash Crusaders in Gaborone, Herman Kitshoff, the exercise was to limit temptations of wrong doings and theft by his employees.
"When they are tempted to do something wrong then the test would be a reminder that they would be caught," he said.
The exercise followed a dismissal of one employee who was sent back to South Africa after the company found out he was misappropriating money.
Kitshoff then hired a South African company, EQUES Risk Management group, to conduct the test on its employees to figure out who might be doing the company wrong.
Although he asserts that it was a voluntary test, employees maintain it was a forced exercise. For an individual test, the exercise took as long as 2 and half hours with the plugged machinery gauging their blood pressure while at the same time one was being asked "creepy" questions. "He asked us spooky and ghostly questions. It was total terror to us. We have never been tortured before," another employee revealed. Kitshoff, however, insisted there was no torture involved. Theo Hartzenberg is the man who was operating the polygraph and says nobody showed discomfort except one lady who cried during the test. "She cried due to the stress," admitted Hartzenberg.
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But he denied that the machine inflicts pain arguing that they only use light pressure. Kitshoff also claimed they would not use the results of the test to dismiss employees, but did not rule out victimization. He says, "I do not want to loose my good people and only one has a problem with the test. He should be victimized because it means he has done something wrong."
According to an official at the Department of Labour, who refused to be named as he was not the official spokesperson, many companies in Botswana have done polygragh tests done on their employees, since there was no law governing the use of it. But the office could not be drawn to discuss the subject because, they said, polygraph is not an issue that concerns them, but the police. The police also could not stop the exercise because they say the law is silent on the matter. At the time of going to print, the test was ongoing behind closed doors in the basement of the Payless Shopping complex at Gaborone Station.
The Borakanelo police had earlier taken Kitshoff and Hartzenberg for questioning but released them later because "we could not find any provision of the law to enable us to confiscate the machine," said the acting station commander for Borakanelo Police, assistant superintendent Mogotsi Thelo.
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