07 Nov 2021

Botswana has an abundance of excellent ideas and initiatives to improve competitiveness, but its bane remains lack of accountability, and total absence of consequence management for orgnisational leaders. 

Botswana National Productivity Centre (BNPC) head of innovation, research and development, Dr Zelda Okatch said this during a global competitiveness webinar on Thursday. 

She said poor implementation was attributable to, among others, ineffective project planning and management, inadequate institutional capacity and lack of trained personnel. 

She added that lack of consequence management perpetuated the lack of accountability, as leaders knew no action would be taken against them for failure to deliver. 

“In other countries when something goes wrong, the chief executive officer normally resigns, but in Botswana they don’t,” she said.

 She decried the use of outdated data in rating the country’s competitiveness, and urged local institutions to give timely and accurate information. 

The absence of accurate data could only result in wrong decisions, as decision-makers would be misled by the inaccurate data. 

Dr Okatch also called on the country’s institutions to regularly update data on their websites, noting that such information could be used for global rankings. 

On other issues, she said there was need to build and support the entrepreneurial culture in the country. 

She stated the country was doing well in business start-ups, but that the majority of them failed to survive because they competed with larger businesses. 

She added that the solution lay in collaboration between small, medium and large enterprises. 

Dr Okatch also said the country could consider giving tax incentives to firms that subcontracted small business. The law should also make provision for tender splitting to allow smaller businesses opportunity to survive. 

Another official from BNPC, Ms Masedi Mosa-Sebele said getting the country out of the middle-income trap would not be easy judging by the trajectory of other countries that managed to graduate. 

She noted that from 1960 to 2010, only 13 countries out of 101 middle-income countries had managed to move to the high-income status. 

She said it was therefore important to come up with strategies and polices to improve economic growth and transition to a high income status. 

The webinar was organised by the Ministry of Employment, Labour Productivity and Skills Development in partnership with BNPC.ends