17 Nov 2020

Government should look at creating an all-encompassing citizen economic empowerment law and enact policies that will ensure many Batswana benefit from a more broad-based approach.

Serowe North Member of Parliament, Mr Baratiwa Mathoothe shared the sentiments when responding to the State of the Nation Address on Monday.

Mr Mathoothe said there hadbeen instances where citizen-owned companies had been handed lucrative large-scale projects by government in areas such as construction, but pass-on funds to foreigners through subcontracting non-citizen firms for surveying and other downstream activities.

“If there were policies that ensure that any citizen owned company that received such lucrative projects from government empower other Batswana through employing locals and subcontracting other citizen-owned firms, then empowerment could be broad-based,” Mr Mathoothe said.

He urged the government to expedite the review of the land policy to ensure that more Batswana had access to land and associated services such as water.

The legislator called for the acceleration of positive initiatives, acknowledging that government was trying the best to ensure that villages such as Serule, Gojwane and Topisi in his constituency had better water connectivity.

Also observing that over time there had been efforts to connect Serowe to the Letsibogo Dam pipeline, Mr Mathoothe said such commendable initiatives were reversed by an ageing and faulty internal water network within Serowe which disturbed the distribution of water within the village.

As such Mr Mathoothe called on the government to speedily rehabilitate the Serowe internal water pipelines and for boreholes and for small dams in the rural areas to be developed and renewed to boost human water consumption, as well as agricultural stock and farm production.

He said noble intentions of the country becoming self-sufficient in agricultural produce as part of economic recovery in response to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic could be undone by a lack of fully resourced agricultural offices countrywide. Ends