20 Nov 2018

The increase in the number of micro lender businesses in the country is an indication that the majority of workers in the country struggle to make ends meet on their salaries, and also points to a nation living in debt, Molepolole North MP, Mr Mohammed Khan has said.

Making his input to the State-of-the-Nation Address (SONA), Mr Khan said the majority of public servants were underpaid, leading to financial difficulties, which prevented them from working to the best of their abilities.

“Imagine a teacher trying to teach a class a sena motlakase ko lapeng (with no electricity in his house)? 

We cannot expect civil servants to concentrate on their jobs when they are struggling financially, and have only a few hundred pula for their take home in their salaries.

The government needs to address the wages and working conditions of civil servants,” Mr Khan said.

He also said that in some schools, teachers still had to instruct large classes of learners, which he said further compromised the quality of the output in the education system.

“Teaching is a noble profession, but it is made burdensome by the poor teacher-pupil ration in some schools. 

We need to make teaching attractive and increase the number of teachers in schools so that they can focus on teaching a manageable number of pupils,” he articulated.

Mr Khan further said that the country’s education system as a whole should be subjected to an evaluation by Parliament including the regulation of private sector education. 

He castigated private schools for charging parents astronomical prices for tuition, saying the school fees were hiked regularly and thus needed to be regulated by Parliament.

Additionally, Mr Khan said the SONA presented by President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi was not a fair assessment of the current situation.

“A SONA should be a fair and honest presentation of the good, the bad and the ugly. 

But all I heard were reports given from ministries focusing on positive developmental projects that have long been proposed; it was a cosmetic approach to the state of the nation,” Mr Khan lamented.

He said that the country had many developmental challenges, as well as areas of democratic governance that needed to be worked on, and for that the country needed an honest appraisal of its current limitations.

Mr Khan praised Leader of the Opposition, Mr Duma Boko for his assertion that the country was at a crossroads, and needed to make choices that could decide whether Botswana missed out on benefiting from the fourth industrial revolution taking place globally. ENDS