17 Feb 2019

Specially elected Member of Parliament and Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry, Ms Bogolo Kenewendo has reiterated government’s commitment to facilitate both foreign and domestic investors in setting up businesses.

Contributing to the 2019/2020 budget proposal debate, Ms Kenewendo highlighted that government has over the past months been aggressive on investor attraction and deliberate on sectors of interest.

She said it was pleasing that some of the investor missions were promising to bear fruit, as some investors had shown interest through conducting scoping studies, while some had conducted preliminary investigations.

Her ministry, she said, would open investor facilitation offices in both Gaborone and Francistown with the aim to lure investors to the cities and the surrounding areas.

 She emphasised the need to enhance government’s transparency and information sharing capacity with all stakeholders in order to instill confidence on potential investors. 

 Ms Kenewendo applauded the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development for allocating funds towards investing in the development of key economic enabler projects that would support growth such as transportation and logistics for the country to reach its economic transformation agenda.

She stated that infrastructure development should not solely focus on government self-capitalisation, but should also allow for private sector participation.

 The involvement of the private sector in the infrastructure development drive, she said, would serve as a true example of Public Private Partnership (PPP), which was a way of delivering key infrastructure projects at less cost to the state. 

She said there should be more PPP enablers like the need to consider risk weighted contingent liabilities when calculating statutory debt to enable the private sector more involvement in major infrastructure development.

 “Contingent liability should not be classified as real debt as the country will not be able to adopt and have more PPP projects as that kind of debt will be limited by statutory debt limit,” Ms Kenewendo said.

She said it was pleasing that the proposed budget posed some opportunities for the private sector, especially on opening up the PPP space. She added that there was focus on private sector growth and private sector development.

She decried the lack of implementation to execute government projects, but said she remained optimistic that the proposed project management and implementation office would remedy the situation as it would be focusing more on the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of projects to ensure timely delivery. 

She said the country has been doing well when it comes to public finance management, and that it has a great sovereign debt rating which it should use to its advantage to attract more investors in the large economic and transformational infrastructure by encouraging PPP participation. ENDS