19 Feb 2018

MP for Okavango, Mr Bagalatia Arone, has wished President Lt Gen. Dr Seretse Khama Ian Khama good luck and good health as he leaves the presidential office to pursue other endeavours in life.

Commenting on the 2018/2019 budget proposal Thursday, Mr Arone said the government, under President Khama’s leadership, came up with a lot of social upliftment programmes that had improved most Batswana’s standard of living.

During his term in office, he said President Khama also did a lot of good things for the country such as sport development and reviving culture throughout the entire country.

“Some of us from peripheral areas, like the Okavango, part of our culture had diminished, but with his efforts we’ve now seen young people and elderly people being engaged in reviving different cultural practices in the whole country,” he said.

“We have also seen his commitment in developing sport in the country through constituency tournaments,” he added.

He thanked Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr Kenneth Matambo, for the 2018/2019 budget proposal, saying Botswana was doing fairly well ‘looking at the resource governance index or the structure of our economy and our regulatory framework in this country.’

“That’s why we are talking about the ease of doing business in this country, but of course we still have certain challenges.

When we talk about the ease of doing business in this country, we should be able to look at different categories of our country so that at the end of the day those who are new entrants in the business environment should not struggle to breakthrough,” he said.

Some of the challenges that government needs to pay more attention to, he said were issues of acquiring land and challenges of enforcing a number of pronouncements in terms of affirmative action programmes aimed at empowering, among other, women, youth and people living with disability.

“We need to ensure that these pronouncements are well understood within our departments and government as a whole, so that when it comes to implementation of our intended efforts, we then achieve the positive results that we want,” said Mr Arone.

The Okavango MP said he agreed with Minister Matambo that government needed to grow its tax base or revenue base, adding that there was also the need to come up with more strategies on how to grow the country’s revenue base. 

One of the areas that government needed to look at and review, he said, was the laws and regulations that guided issuance of residence and work permits to people who wanted to invest in Botswana.

Although the country has good strategies in place to attract foreign direct investment, he expressed concern that government had made it cheap for people to come and live in Botswana.

“But we are supposed to attract true investors and not just everybody. People come into this country because it is easy to come into this country empty handed and tomorrow they are rich,” he added.

The  MP said the tourism sector had a ‘great’ potential of growing the country’s economy, more especially in the Okavango region, but was not fully exploited.

For his part, Mr Sedirwa Kgoroba of Mogoditshane, said Minister Matambo did not mention in the budget proposal how much government had spent, so far on the Economic Stimulus Programme (ESP), how many more jobs were created through ESP and how many projects had been completed on time.

“I am not saying ESP was a bad initiative, but I have doubts on its implementation, costing and structuring from the onset. To me, it comes forth just as another feeding scheme where projects are overpriced to help enrich a few greedy cartels,” he added.

Mr Kgoroba asked the minister to include unemployment figures in his next budget proposal speech, disclosing the criterion applied, ‘because never before in my entire life have I seen such high unemployment in this country.’

The statistics of unemployment given in the budget proposal speech, Mogoditshane MP said were doctored. Additionally, he said in the budget speech, the minister also mentioned prudent economic management, job creation opportunities and economic diversification mentioned, saying ‘from time immemoria’ l we’ve heard this diversification so many times, but we do not see where this diversification is.

Mr Kgoroba said he was tired of the word ‘economic diversification’, because to him it was just a narrative that had no intention and no commitment.

“And when you talk of job creation, you can’t just be blanket, because I suspect Statistics Botswana includes Ipelegeng within the statistics of those who are employment, but this is a temporary measure and it is a wrong criteria to do that,” he said.

“What is wrong with us giving the genuine statistical figures? we cannot fear the truth, because we cannot hide from the truth. But, if we keep on hiding the statistics for fear of exposing the truth to the world and to our people, we are deceiving ourselves, because it is a reality that we have to deal with,” he added.

Mochudi West MP, Mr Gilbert Mangole said Minister Matambo did not mention anything new in his 2018/19 budget proposal speech, ‘what he presented was just recycled things that he has been saying every year. It’s one and the same thing, time in and time out.’

He also expressed concern that there was a serious distortion of unemployment statistics in Botswana, as they did not reflect the true picture on the ground.

“There is nothing on the ground that proves that what the minister has said in his speech about unemployment rates is true. These unemployment statistics, have been distorted by inclusion of Ipelegeng figures in the calculation of unemployment figures,” he said. Ends