13 Aug 2023

Botswana Police Service (BPS), inspired by their oath to submit to serve the republic, to obey lawful commands for the preservation of peace and crime prevention, have been working on strategies to align their work with Presidential Reforms in order to achieve improved work outcomes.

This was revealed by acting BPS commissioner, Mr Phemelo Ramakorwane while giving welcome remarks during President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi’s visit to BPS senior management in Gaborone on Friday.

Mr Ramakorwane said they had understood the concern around public service delivery issues, implementation failures and low performance outputs, and had sought to remedy this by aligning their strategy with the Presidential Reset Agenda.

“To this end, we are conducting lecturers in line with our Employee Engagement Plan to motivate behavioural change required to influence the desired work outcomes. 

These engagements are ongoing across police establishments to embrace all government reforms and discharge to the best of our skills and knowledge, performance worthy of our contribution to national peace and security,” Mr Ramakorwane said.

He said they had formed a Digital Transformation Board which worked with SmartBots and they had mapped out six services for online service delivery, amongst them the payment of traffic fines, livestock clearance permit and forensic pathology examination request.

Mr Ramakorwane said BPS had contributed to the Presidential call to save Botswana population from COVID-19 by contributing more than P10 million to the cause, and that the entire police force had been vaccinated.

“Following the launch of this priority area, BPS has assembled a mindset change campaign team. 

It has already started work on customised mindset change branding for the organisation. 

The team will, amongst others, develop mindset change thematic areas, which will be cascaded to all ranks,” Mr Ramakorwane said.

He further revealed that BPS was looking to improve its position in international fora, currently being the third vice president for African Union Mechanism for Police Cooperation and having been invited by Interpol for capacity-building and training to assess cyber crime training programmes for Naif University of Security Studies in Saudi Arabia.

Additionally, Mr Ramakorwane said BPS had submitted 16 applications for United Nations Police vacancies and appointed an officer to the position of Interpol Regional Training Specialist.

On the country’s crime statistics, Mr Ramakorwane said over the years crime had remained manageable overall, although there remained a concern around murder, rape, defilement, threat to kill; with stock theft, missing persons and armed robbery also continuing to pose a threat. ends