28 May 2019

Botswana’s political landscape is still very much male dominated with a huge gender disparity, Speaker of the National Assembly Ms Gladys Kokorwe has said.

Welcoming the new US ambassador  to Botswan Mr Craig Cloud to the National Assembly, Ms Kokorwe out of the country’s 63 MPs, only six were women.

“We have a total of 63 MPs, among them 57 elected in general elections and six who are specially elected MPs. But, we only have six women in Parliament, and we have myself, Dr Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi and Ms Botlogile Tshireletso retiring at the end of the current Parliament. There are other women standing for election in the upcoming election but we still have a long way to go to address gender imbalance in political representation,” Ms Kokorwe said.

She said neighbouring states such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Rwanda offered important lessons on improving women representation in politics noting that the mentioned countries had taken innovative steps such as reserving a quota for women to ensure progress there.

“We also have to deal with the socialization which makes people believe that political leaders have to be men, which often leads to women not supporting women political candidates no matter how qualified they are to hold office,” Ms Kokorwe said.

Ambassador Cloud, who recently replaced Mr Earl Miller as the US’ head of diplomatic mission to Botswana, had raised  concern that while Botswana was doing well in terms of female representation in key senior positions in the civil service and the private sector, in politics the gender dynamics were highly skewed towards men.

Mr Cloud also probed when the country would televise parliamentary sessions to which the speaker said there was an ongoing process of convincing the relevant stakeholders to sanction the development.

“It is certainly one of the issues I had hoped to achieve during my tenure as Speaker. We have an initiative of taking Parliament to the people, where we interact with communities countrywide and live televised Parliament is a development Batswana have communicated an interest in. It is only just that the ordinary people get to listen to their representatives articulate issues live on national television. We will continue to discuss the matter with the executive,” Ms Kokorwe said.

With Mr Cloud noting that Botswana MPs were expected by their constituents to be on the ground attending to even social events such as funerals, he wondered if this did not take up the time they had to spend on parliamentary sessions and sub-committees.

Ms Kokorwe clarified that each MP was provided with a constituency office manned by five staff, which helped them to address their area concerns. 

It was also the culture of local politics for area MPs to brief their constituents and attend to local people’s concerns during kgotla meetings, she explained.

Ms Kokorwe further revealed that after serving for 27 years in the civil service, a further 15 years as an MP, then having been in the diplomatic service as Botswana’s ambassador to Zimbabwe, then Speaker of the National Assembly, she felt the time was right to retire from public office.

She welcomed Mr Cloud to the country- a career member of the American Senior Foreign Service, who has served as an American diplomat since 1992 and most recently as management counselor at the US embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. ends