25 Nov 2018

Member of Parliament for Kgalagadi South, Mr Frans Van Der Westhuizen says government needs to be proactive in providing empowerment initiatives in order to lift the various communities that reside in Kgalagadi District from the abject poverty they find themselves in.

Contributing to the debate on the State-of-the-Nation Address, Mr Van Der Westhuizen, who is Assistant Minister of Agricultural Development and Food Security, said the district as a whole was faced with the scourge of poverty and needed hands-on initiatives to transform the material living conditions of its people.

“Poverty and underdevelopment are challenges I have spoken about in detail during my time as an MP, and I hope future representatives for the area will do the same. Even when we have some of our people trying to be enterprising, they face challenges.  

For example, some of the small scale projects such as the construction of houses for civil servants are offered to entrepreneurs from elsewhere.  At the Khawa Dune Challenge we have service providers from as far as South Africa providing basic amenities such as portable toilets that could be provided by locals,” Mr Van Der Westhuizen lamented.

He called for the proposed upgrade of Tsabong Hospital to be speeded up, stating that the area required a referral hospital as their current situation of health service provision in the Kgalagadi District places people’s lives in danger.

“The nearest referral hospital is 500km away from Tsabong and 800km if you live in Streizendam. Some of our clinics such as the one in Khawa do not offer maternity services. This compromises the health of our people,” he said.

The legislator said he was in full support of the proposed lifting of the hunting ban, stating that human-wildlife conflict in his constituency had been fuelled by the freezing of hunting activities.  

Mr Van Der Westhuizen said he supported controlled hunting, which he said could assist in balancing the ecosystem and protecting human lives as well as generating income for locals.

He further expressed gratitude to the government for including Tsabong as one of the areas where a mini sports complex would be constructed, saying that for long the area had been neglected when it came to sports infrastructure.

Mr Van Der Westhuizen criticised the opposition for being unstable so soon after the 2014 general elections, which he said had given some people hope that the country could evolve a strong opposition that could challenge the governing party.

“In 2014, people showed confidence in the opposition by voting for them in large numbers.  But they have been let down because they have since turned against each other in public. My hope is that the people of my constituency Kgalagadi South will not vote for the opposition as it has proved to be unreliable,” Mr Van Der Westhuizen said.

Having lost the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) primary elections ahead of the 2019 general elections, Mr Van Der Westhuizen took the opportunity to thank his constituents for the five year term they gave him as their parliamentarian.

“Since I will not be returning to Parliament after the next elections I take this opportunity to thank the people of Kgalagadi South for the great honour they humbled me with, allowing me to represent them in Parliament. I am also grateful for the chance I had to serve as an assistant minister. I got to interact with Batswana from across the country. I also thank my colleagues in Parliament,” he said.

He further asked Batswana to jealously guard their republican democratic culture and not to allow tribalism to divide the country, stating that all Batswana should be united under one flag, with cultural minorities protected. ENDS