25 Sep 2022

Botswana Institute of Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Offenders (BIRRO), boot camps are to resume, following months of internal processes revision.

BIRRO director, Mr Mothei Sejakgomo announced at a kgotla meeting tha was convened in Gaborone to share the revamped processes with the community to ensure smooth delivery of services.

He said a patron’s suicide a few months back prompted the authorities to halt everything to make way for investigations.

He admitted that the incident, which caused controversy, highlighted some shortcomings in their internal processes.

He, therefore, expressed gratitude to all institutions and individuals that stood by them during the difficult time.

Mr Sejakgomo said going forward, they had opted to include parents in the boot camps, as elders also went through mental health and drug abuse challenges.

“We realised that our previous cohort of patrons that exited the boot camp at the time of investigations had relapsed.

However, our intension is to get in touch with their families and complete our exercise of counselling and rehabilitating them,” he said.

He said this time, they had forged ties with different organisations to help with professional rehabilitation and reintegration interventions, which would bring transparency and ease the burden of doing everything from a central point.

He said key stakeholders included the ministries of education and health as well as Department of Justice and Security to assist with the provision of strategic interventions to both parents and children in need of help.

Mr Sejakgomo said the Department of Gender Affairs would come on board to help parents to deal with their social problems, while churches would be given a stake to come on board and encourage patrons.

“We will not appoint one church, rather we will allow all churches to assist where possible and this we will achieve through references from parents across communities,” he said.

Unfortunately, Mr Sejakgomo said their assessments revealed that some people, including parents, smuggled drugs and other unwanted substances when visiting patrons, which defeated their intentions.

He said this time around, they would not enrol children for boot camps without the consent of both parents, saying that this had proved challenging, especially when parents fought over the decision taken.

He said they had temporarily stopped enrolling females in order to prepare for them to have separate spaces away from males.

For her part, Kgosi Patricia Radipati thanked BIRRO management for the ‘wonderful job’ they were doing.

She urged them to speed up preparations for enrolling females, saying that her community, for one, was faced with a crisis of drug abuse among young ladies.

Kgosi Radipati said the girls resorted to shoplifting and selling the loot in order to buy drugs.

She urged parents to encourage and counsel each other on these issues, adding that talking should be recommended over flogging.

She pleaded with members of the community to assist BIRRO to fully carry out its mandate. ENDS