18 Feb 2016

Those who criticise the government’s economic policy choices and development programmes lack a historical perspective of the long journey the country has had to travel since independence.

Assistant Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Ms Botlogile Tshireletso said this when contributing to the budget debate in Parliament on Wednesday.

Ms Tshireletso, who is also Mahalapye East Member of Parliament (MP), said many of the government’s critics lacked an appreciation of how much had been achieved since independence, and the challenges that the country still faces.
“At independence, we were one of the world’s poorest, least developed nations and we faced challenges such as a severe drought, which struck us at a time when we were a largely rural agrarian society.

But over the years, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) led government has managed to gradually improve the country’s physical infrastructure and social development,” she said.

Ms Tshireletso said prudent macro-economic management and sound planning in successive budgets and National Development Plans (NDPs) had led to the country overcoming the myriad of challenges it faced.

“During the early years of our country’s independence, we were surrounded by hostile white minority regimes such as apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), South West Africa (Namibia), Angola and Mozambique. Instead of having developmental partners around us, we had hostile states, and we were eventually forced to set up our own national army at a huge cost. We overcame this challenge, just as we later overcame animal-borne diseases and HIV/AIDS because of good planning,” she said.

Ms Tshireletso said Botswana slowly built her economy, citing the construction of the University of Botswana where ordinary citizens contributed,  with the government gradually getting the country to a position it could heavily invest in citizen economic empowerment.

“We now have the Citizen Economic Empowerment Agency (CEDA) and the National Development Bank (NDB), where Batswana can source start-up capital for their businesses, and the Local Entrepreneur Agency (LEA), where citizen entrepreneurs are empowered with business skills,” she said.

Ms Tshireletso said the government’s critics should understand that just as the country’s development of the past 50 years took place gradually, none of the current challenges could be overcome overnight. She further urged Batswana to be sensitive and remove all forms of discrimination within society, be it based on gender or sexual orientation.  Ends