19 Oct 2017

Minister of Nationality, Immigration and Gender Affairs Mr Edwin Batshu has expressed concern that Botswana was experiencing a high number of divorce cases.

Addressing media on Tuesday in Gaborone regarding services offered by his ministry, Mr Batshu said a total of 170 divorces were registered between January and September 2017, adding that the figure translated to an average of 19 divorce cases per month.

He said the statistics were alarming and solutions must be found to address the issue since marriages are foundations of strong families.

“What worries as far as I am concerned is the rate at which divorce cases are taking place in our courts. Since the beginning of this year, we have registered 170 divorces and that’s an average of 19 divorce cases a month which is quite alarming, an alarming rate which should be interrogated to determine why people divorce,” said Mr Batshu.

He further explained that he has held talks with religious organisations in an effort to identify solutions.

He said marriage should be preserved because ‘it is the bedrock of any strong society.’

The minister however said he was encouraged by the fact that more marriages were taking place under the ‘Re A Nyalana’ initiative which was established in 2012 with an objective to encourage cohabitating couples to legally marry.

Minister Batshu said Re A Nyalana was established after investigations carried out in the past had pointed out that there was a lot of cohabitation in the country, which was found to be undesirable.

“For the period they have been in existence a total of 3 713 couples have benefitted from the initiative,” he said.

Marriage registration is important for national statistics purposes and also helps government to plan for development, he added.

He noted that the country has recorded 173, 534 marriages since 1885.

Regarding the registration of societies, the minister said a total of 8 961 societies registered in the country.

He said the registration of new religious societies has continued to increase despite the threshold for registration having increased from a minimum of 20 to 150 people.

The minister said 120 religious societies were registered between October 2016 and September 2017, while 130 charity societies, and 104 sports societies were also registered during the same period. BOPA