For all intents and purposes, the soon to be established Botswana Trade and Investment Centre (BITC) must hit the ground running.
The organization, a government parastatal offshoot between the merged Botswana Export Development and Investment Authority (BEDIA) and the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) comes into being at a time when Botswana is faced with a lot of economic challenges ranging from high unemployment to failed attempts to diversify the economy.
The merger of the two erstwhile investment-attracting parastatals was borne out of a realization of duplicated economic diversification efforts which had undoubtedly failed to yield the desired results.
We applaud the government for rising up to the challenge of realizing that the country needs a fully fledged trade investment arm vis-à-vis the previous uncoordinated foreign investment attraction efforts.
It however defies logic why the merger did not include the Botswana Development Corporation as it equally plays the role of an economic diversification and development initiative by government.
The BDC, as a government investment arm, would have come handy in the merger by way of providing funding for viable projects within the ambit of the BITC.
While it is desirable that the new parastatal attracts foreign investors and foreign direct investment into the country, the BDC in collaboration with the Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (CEDA) should equally have been tasked with the onerous task of propelling domestic development.
For as long as we are unable to exalt domestic development to the apex of our economic development agenda, it would always be difficult to attract foreign investment. This is especially so given that the global economy has not yet fully recovered from the last economic down turn.
Some of the questions that potential foreign investors would certainly ask is what it is that we are not doing right to shore up our own domestic development. They (foreign investors) would invariably ask themselves whether we are a country capable of providing a conducive environment in which they could possibly risk their capital investment.
If the answers are in the negative, it would no doubt be difficult to lure them to invest in an environment that is unlikely to yield the best real returns on their investments. We must be a country that is able to prove that we are worthy of providing that conducive environment. Unless and until we prove so, foreign direct investment will always elude us. As much as we yearn for foreign investment, we should spare no efforts in shoring up domestic development as a precondition for attracting foreign investment.
This invariably calls on the new BITC to work collaboratively and tirelessly with agencies like BDC and CEDA to drive the domestic development agenda forward.
All the development agencies must play a coordinated and meaningful role in ensuring that all the barriers that have often impeded the setting up of new companies and industries in the country are expeditiously removed.
The other issues that these developments arms should deal with include speedy access to serviced land and competitive utility tariffs. Botswana remains one of the countries in the southern African region with high utility tariffs. This issue should be addressed with the utmost urgency. It is impeding our economic diversification drive and attraction of the much needed investments.
The BITC, as a new body, should ensure that at the outset it is able to attract the appropriate skilled manpower to drive its mandate and our economic development agenda.
Government should also streamline its activities and allow the new parastatal to bring the best out of the world to come and invest in our country and create the necessary employment for many Batswana who are currently unemployed.
BEDIA and IFSC have in their life spans failed to deliver on the job creation agenda hence our unemployment rate still stands high at almost 18 percent.
It is our ardent hope that cabinet will judiciously appoint the most suitable candidate to the post of BITC chief executive officer with the verve and zeal to speedily set up and guide the new organization to address the numerous economic challenges bedeviling our country.
It is in this vein that we call on the new BITC to hit the ground running. 
