02 Oct 2018

Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Infrastructure and Housing Development, Mr Dikagiso Mokotedi, says high construction costs have led to increase in the prices of Botswana Housing Corporation (BHC) properties.

In his presention to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) last week, Mr Mokotedi said while the ministry was aware of complaints that BHC houses were expensive, the corporation needed to balance books in order to repay loans acquired from commercial banks to finance its projects.

He said since stoppage of government subvention over  20 years ago, BHC had to rely on borrowing from commercial banks to continue with its housing projects.

He further said high costs of servicing land with amenities such as water and electricity increased expenses incurred by BHC during projects construction.

“One of the unfortunate experiences is that whenever they (BHC) are allocated land throughout the country, somehow they are often allocated land in the peripheries where there are no services.  

I know that servicing of land is a major problem, but they appear to be on the receiving end in terms of allocation of land because sometimes they are allocated a portion of land without anything,” said the permanent secretary.

Mr Mokotedi said the expectation was always that because BHC was a government agency, it  would service land and provide roads, electricity and other amenities.

He said for BHC to provide those amenities, it had to borrow money from the commercial banks and that was factored in when BHC made a valuation of its properties.

“Land servicing is a serious issue for us as a ministry because though we don’t service land, we actually depend on serviced land to deliver our services,” he added.

Mr Mokotedi further said the ministry transformation process which started two years ago had taken longer than they would have wanted.

He said this was because the ministry depended on other entities to facilitate them.

Concerning the general construction industry, he said there was a process of re-implementing the various acts with a view to re-organising the industry.

“For a very long time we have operated the construction industry in a vacuum.  

That is perhaps why we are not able to, with certainty and confidence, identify constructors who we can classify as indigenous constructors which can compete internationally,” he said.

Mr Mokotedi also said while the project to develop a register for all government properties was still a work in progress, they had been able to register properties to the extent possible and have covered substantial parts of the country. Ends