19 Mar 2020

The Minister of Transport and Communications, Mr Thulagano Segokgo has presented before Parliament, the ministry budget totaling about P3.5 billion for the 2020/21 financial year.

This amount is made up of P1.9 billion for the recurrent budget and P1.6 billion for the development budget. 

He said the largest portion of the recurrent budget would go to the Department of Information Technology with an amount of P525 million or 27 per cent.

The money would be used for maintenance and running of equipment, computer systems consumables, maintenance and personnel emoluments.

Mr Segokgo said P500 million or 26 per cent would go towards financing the Central Transport Organisation.

The money would be used for personal emoluments, petrol oil and lubricants, subcontracted repairs, corporate services, Civil Aviation Authority, Botswana Post Savings Group Limited, and Botswana Post (Universal Service Obligation), among other things.

The Department of Roads would be allocated P354 million or 18 per cent of the total ministry budget which would be used for maintenance of roads.

Mr Segokgo further indicated that, the Department of Road Transport and Safety had been allocated a share of P180.6 million  to be used for personal emoluments and other charges, while Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services had been allocated P14 million.

Mr Segokgo further said from the bulk of the development budget, the largest share of  P1.2 billion representing 77.1 per cent of the total budget would go towards roads infrastructure projects.

Major projects to benefit include Gaborone – Boatle road, Kazungula and Mohembo Bridges, Mogoditshane - Gabane - Mmankgodi Junction, Charleshill-Ncojane road, Dibete-Mookane-Machaneng road, Botswana Integrated Transport Project (BITP) projects, Output and Performance-based Road Contracts (OPRCs), to mention but a few. 

Furthermore, he said the second largest share of the ministry’s development budget is P 306. 8m  representing 18.8 per cent of the budget  would go towards Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure.”

The projects include local access network, national backbone, Government Data Network expansion, Government of Botswana Enterprise Architecture (e-Gov), eservices resuscitation, and schools connectivity project.

The third largest share of P45m representing 2.8 per cent of the budget goes towards civil aviation infrastructure programme.

Meanwhile, Mr Segokgo indicated that for the 2020/2021 financial year, the Department of Road Transport and Safety (DRTS) would improve services for registration of motor vehicles, renewal of vehicle licenses, issuance and renewal of driver licenses through online service of which Phase I of the online services would commence on July 2020.

Furthermore, he said since the commencement of Open Skies Policy in 2010, six scheduled carriers, which are Air Botswana, Air Namibia, Ethiopian Airlines, SA Airlink, South African Express and Qatar Airways had begun to offer direct connections between Botswana and South Africa (Johannesburg), Namibia (Windhoek), Ethiopia (Addis Ababa) and The State of Qatar (Doha).

“We have intensified our efforts to attract more airlines to our skies and we target to land at least one additional airline during the next financial year, 2020/21,” he said.   

Mr Segokgo further said government had established the Universal Access and Service Fund (UASF or the Fund) to facilitate provision of ICT services to unserved and underserved communities.

To this effect, he said the fund will cover upgrades of base stations to high speed broadband networks and provision of broadband connectivity in public schools, with 91 primaries and 24 secondary, at 64 villages in the Kweneng District.

“The Fund will also provide financial subsidies to mobile operators to expand network coverage to identified farming community in the Kweneng region,” he stated. 

He also said the postal sector had leveraged on ICT resulting in the deployment of a counter automation enterprise resource planning system for all post offices in Botswana for real time monitoring of the ICT solutions uptake, service availability and to allow prompt and immediate attention to issues that may affect and impact their service provision. Ends