13 Feb 2019

Mahalapye East MP and Assistant Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Ms Botlogile Tshireletso says intersex people, like every other person, need to have their rights protected by law so that they too could enjoy their fundamental rights.

Contributing to the ongoing debate on the budget speech, Ms Tshireletso argued that presently, intersex people were suffering all forms of discrimination.

She said one of the ways in which they were being ill-treated was being assigned either of their two genitals through corrective surgery at birth.

She said ideally, intersex people should be allowed to decide which genitalia to retain and which one to forego if they so wished.

Ms Tshireletso said sex workers were also another marginalised group in Botswana that needed to be protected.

She said ignoring issues pertaining to them would not erase the reality that they actually existed.

The MP said sex workers suffered at the hands of those who used their services as well as from those of healthcare workers, hence the need to have them protected by way of putting in place appropriate pieces of legislation.

Ms Tshireletso noted that if not addressed, the marginalisation of the two groups of people would reverse the gains that Botswana had made in relation to the fight against HIV/AIDS.

On a different issue, the legislator decried the growing problem of unemployment that had besieged the nation.

Highlighting how important it was for government to hasten to address the problem, she said time had come to acknowledge that government was under immense pressure because of the rising levels of unemployment.

On the poverty eradication initiative, she noted that it was sad that the financial resources that had been plowed into the initiative had had minimal returns.

She attributed the failure of the programme to produce desirable effects to, among others, funding beneficiaries with no business acumen.

In his debate, Gaborone North MP Mr Haskins Nkaigwa said there was nothing new in the budget save for the usual rhetoric.

Mr Nkaigwa said he had hoped the budget would make a special dispensation for the two cities of Gaborone and Francistown by allocating them at least P1 billion each for the upkeep of their infrastructure, observing that at the moment the state of infrastructure in the two cities was an eyesore.

The MP indicated further that he had hoped that the budget would address the issue of implementation, which he said had for years now been bedeviling the country.

He said it was disappointing that there were instances in which the country had started repaying loans that had been secured from some development partners such as the World Bank when projects for which the funding had been sought had not been implemented.

On education, Mr Nkaigwa appealed to the Botswana Qualifications Authority (BQA) to conduct an audit of all tertiary institutions operating in Botswana to ascertain their capability to produce quality graduates needed by the economy. ENDS