08 May 2014

Minister of Labour and Home Affairs, Mr Edwin Batshu says his ministry is mandated to, among other things, undertake civil and national registration for the benefit of all Batswana.

The minister said this mandate was derived from the National Registration Act, the Births and Deaths Registration Act, the Marriage Act and the Married Person’s Property Act as well as the Societies Registration Act.

He indicated that births and deaths represented vital events, which were the basis for civil registration. Mr Batshu said as a system, civil registration had a number of benefits because an effective civil registration system was essential for the accurate planning of programmes designed to promote the country’s people.

He said an effective system included demographic analysis of statistics, which were essential for proper planning of social development, including the design and implementation of public health measures, such as maternal and child care, family planning, social security, education, housing and economic development.

“The information can also be used to project and monitor population growth” he added. Minister Batshu indicated that his ministry faces a challenge where some segment of the population has still not registered under the Births and Deaths Act and the National Registration Act, resulting in loss of data integrity due to incomplete registers as well as those suffering what he termed a “scandal of invisibility”.

He said it is therefore, of great importance to encourage and facilitate registration in order to build a more accurate and reliable National Register.
Mr Batshu also invoked his statutory powers to exempt from payment of service fees and charges on those affected generally for a period of 12 months from 1st April 2014 to 31st March 2015.

He has also exempted beyond March 2015 all the vulnerable groups from payment of fees in line with the Revised National Destitute Policy 2002, National Plan of Action for Orphans and Vulnerable children 2010-2016.

Mr Batshu said that all cases of late registration of births and deaths will no longer pay the penalty fee of P5 per month in default up to a maximum of P100 for late registration.

Mr Batshu said that in terms of the National Registration Act, it is an offence not to register for National Registration (Omang) within the 30 days of reaching the age of 16 years or obtaining Botswana citizenship.

He said the penalty fine attached to this is an amount not exceeding P500, payable to Botswana Police Service. “Since this is part of the principal Act, not the Regulations, the Ministry have commenced the process of reviewing the National Registration Act to accommodate a waiver in favour of the vulnerable groups and those noted above.

An arrangement has been made with the Botswana Police Service to exercise their power to only warn and caution rather than fine those who have failed to register within the legally prescribed time”, he noted.

“It is on the foregoing that effective from 1st April 2014, the department of Civil and National Registration is on a nationwide operation to register those unregistered and to distribute produced identity cards and births certificates” Batshu added.

The minister noted that from April 1 to the April 30 a total of 15 370 applications have been received, 16 433 have been distributed nationally while 25 214 await collection and also appealed to members of the public to collect these cards. Ends