23 Sep 2018

Minister of Nationality, Immigration and Gender Affairs, Dorcas Makgato, has appealed to Batswana to eliminate and prevent Gender Based Violence (GBV).

Ms Makgato made the plea when addressing a Southern District full council meeting in Kanye last week.

She said gender-based violence was a pervasive human rights violation that people needed all to raise voices against.

She noted that the act was not only traumatic at individual level, but was also devastating at national level.

She said the increasing rate of gender based violence costs government a lot of money and brought impact on family, community and further torevthe nation apart.

Ms Makgato stated that GBV undermines the health, dignity, security and autonomy of its victims, yet it remains shrouded in a culture of silence.

She said GBV could adversely affect the quality of the entire nation, hence its prevention remained critical to local development.

She told councillors that they had a crucial role to play, adding that the gender based violence issue could not continue to be fought in a corner because it was a major public health and human rights violation.

The minister indicated that whether physical, sexual, psychological or in any form, GBV was a direct gross violation of human rights.

She urged councillors to highlight issues to do with relationships between men and women and gender based violence, while imploring members of the public to protect vulnerable members of society and ensure that they indeed lived to the global view of Botswana as a peaceful country.

Concerning the civil and national registration department, Ms Makgato said it continued to change a number of things, among them the simplification of the proceedings for obtaining Omang, lamenting however that a large number of cards remained uncollected.

She urged councillors to encourage the electorates to collect their Omang cards.

The councillors appreciated the changes made by the ministry, though some complained about human trafficking. ENDS