05 Apr 2017

The introduction of land bank is meant to ensure Batswana venture into tourism industry, says Minister of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism, Mr Tshekedi Khama.

Responding to some concerns raised by Ngamiland councillors during a special meeting, he explained that government was worried that foreigners are operating tourism activities, while the locals are doing shoddy jobs within the sector.

Earlier on, the councillors raised a concern that there was no consultation regarding the issue with the affected stakeholders. They said issue of land bank needs to be clear since ministry was now in control of everything.

They argued that initially, the objective was that potential investors should find readily available land and their recommendation was that the ministry should exclude all concessions with investors from land bank.

However, Minister Khama said although some people were against the new arrangement, the land bank was not meant to punish the locals, but rather to reserve land and encourage them to start activities and benefit tourism in the Okavango Delta.

He said most people wanted to start tourism projects in the delta and yet there are other areas such as Kgalagadi and Makgadikgadi, noting that the ministry intended to reserve more land for locals including young people to operate campsites.

The minister revealed efforts were made to allocate campsites to some locals, but expressed frustration that they failed to operate them well and stated that going forward, they want to agree on how the locals could survive in such projects.

Mr Khama appreciated the delay caused by the new arrangement due to lack of experts in his ministry to deal with lease issues, adding that currently he was pleased that they managed to hire two officers and finally they managed to sign some leases in the district.

Councillors also requested the minister to clarify the issue of joint venture agreement since the trusts were sidelined.

They raised a concern that even the procedure to lodge complaints was long and that the arrangement had totally disempowered the communities since monitoring was solely done by the joint venture.

Presenting the concerns, the deputy council chairman, Mr Lathang Molonda revealed that there used to be ownership on the concessions and since the new system to transfer land to the ministry, the communities saw no need to protect wild animals in their respective concessions.

Their recommendation was that the lease agreement should be between the community and the joint venture so as to foster element of ownership on the community trust.

In response, Mr Khama informed them that some decisions were made because the community was concerned about some issues.He said they intended to consult trusts and come up with terms and regulations of lease requirements so that if the joint venture has a complaint, the applicant should continue paying the communities adding that, ‘we want to ensure the agreements are followed to the latter and that the communities benefit as expected’.

Regarding the issue of releasing trust funds from the holding account, Mr Khama said the intention was to ensure the community benefit from the trusts’ funds because there were concerns of mismanagement of funds by some trusts because initially most trust did not have managers and accountants.

He said however said some trusts were doing exceptionally well in financial management as they had hired experts and noted that soon they would be handed over their monies. ENDS