31 Jan 2016

The Minister of Transport and Communications, Mr Tshenolo Mabeo has advised parents to buy shares for their children.

Speaking at the BTCL Initial Public Offering road show in Francistown , he said buying shares for children while they were still young was a way of investing for their future.

He said the government saw it fit to sell part of the Botswana Telecommunications Corporations Limited (BTCL) shares to the public to better the lives of Batswana.

He said the government has decided to put up 49 per cent for sale to the public with five per cent reserved for citizen employees of BTCL and the remaining 51 per cent retained by the government.

He said the government wants citizens to have shares in large corporations so that they could improve their lives with the returns they get from the shares.

Mr Mabeo said Batswana have the opportunity to have up to 1 000 shares each for P1 in one of the leading telecommunications companies in the country.

He said Batswana could use the returns they get from the shares to open new businesses and to expand their existing ones. 

He even encouraged street vendors and hawkers to consider buying shares from BTCL as way of trying to diversify and investing for the future.

He said even if the buying of shares could not bear fruit immediately, buying was a good investment strategy for citizens which they have to embrace.

Mr Mabeo said the purpose of the road show was to educate Batswana before they could buy shares. 

In addition, he said Batswana should first learn about shares, and how the process of buying shares goes before they could take the decision to buy them.

He said BTCL has a prospectus which contains information about the company from the financial performance of BTCL, its strategies, the value and amount of shares on offer and application forms to be used for both members of the public as well as employees of BTCL.

He said from the returns made by BTCL through the buying and selling of shares in the stock exchange, citizens would also have a share of that. Ends