01 Mar 2022

A bigger proportion of the electoral pledges of the ruling party are incorporated within the medium term national development plans of the country, Parliament has heard.

Assistant Minister for Presidential Affairs, Governance and Public Administration, Mr Dumezweni Mthikhulu confirmed this in response to a question in Parliament on Monday.

Mr Mthimkhulu said there were, however, some pledges that did not make it to the country’s medium term national development plans due to misalignment of cycles between the development planning and election processes.

“For example, NDP 11 started implementation on April 1, 2017 to March 31, 2023. The last national elections were held October 2019 in the middle of the third year of NDP 11 and during the seventh month of the financial year 2019/20. NDP 11 was approved by the National Assembly in December 2016,” he said.

However, he said despite misalignment between national development planning and national elections processes, there were two opportunities to introduce new programmes and projects into the NDPs to accommodate the pledges by the ruling party.

“These two avenues have been used to incorporate the pledges within the national development planning framework. The first avenue is through the annual budgets.

In terms of our planning process, new programmes and projects not included in the NDPs can be introduced at the time of the preparation of the annual budgets, which are subsequently approved by Parliament.

Opportunities in this window are very limited as only so much can be done in a year,” he said.

He indicated that the second channel of introducing new programmes and projects into the existing NDP was through the medium term review of such a plan.

The assistant minister explained that the Medium Term Review (MTR) of the NDPs, therefore, provided a meaningful opportunity for the ruling party to get their election promises into the current plan subject to availability of resources and implementation capacity.

“An example is the project to dual the A1 Road, which was initially not part of the NDP 11, but was introduced during the MTR of NDP 11, which was approved by the National Assembly in July 2020 during the financial year 2020/21. This is also true for other development projects. These include hospitals, clinics, roads, water, electrification, village connectivity and many other physical infrastructure projects. This is the area that suffers most from the misalignment of the national elections and NDP cycles.”

The situation, he said, was different for programmes funded under the recurrent budget, he said, adding, ‘these can be accommodated in the next financial year after the general elections.

Again, opportunities in that window are very limited because only so much can be done in a year.”

Mr Mthimkhulu also indicated that discussions on possible alignment of the general elections and NDP cycles had been held before and continued to take place within government to find a permanent solution to the situation.

“Immediately after the elections in November 2019, the Office of the President organised a Cabinet Retreat to develop Cabinet Strategic Thrusts to guide the integration of the ruling party promises into both NDP 11 and annual plans,” he said.

He further indicated that government had a robust planning system and structures to handle requests from the ruling party, therefore setting up a permanent structure to occasionally consider areas where alignment of manifesto pledges and development plans can be made would not be necessary.

Gaborone North MP, Mr Mpho Balopi had wanted to know if the minister was aware that several electoral pledges of the ruling party never made it into the country’s development plans.

Mr Balopi also wanted to know if there were any measures in place to ensure that pledges against which the ruling party was elected into government were incorporated into development plans.

He further wanted to know if there would be a permanent structure where the ruling party and government could occasionally consider areas where alignment of manifesto pledges and development plans could be made. Ends