A narrative abetted regrettably by people who hold very senior positions in government, is being allowed to fester. At its core, it posits that those who have created successful businesses in Botswana, somehow achieved that feat by marginalizing and discriminating against the majority of the population. It is also insinuates that these entrepreneurs achieved success by cutting off the majority of the population from business dealings on no other reason but race. No empirical evidence is ever offered to back up such incendiary propositions.
To continue to peddle this line of thinking just for the sake of political expediency is to lead Botswana society down a ruinous economic road. And to hold out a specific group of people in society and try to use it as a scape goat for limited economic opportunities is a dangerous way of currying political favour with voters. It leads ordinary people to start to think that their less than admirable stations in life are aggravated by the fact that someone is busy building a successful business on the other side of town. That, ladies and gentlemen, is not leadership. It is rather an abdication of leadership. Leaders are expected to pursue the right economic path even if it is not the most popular. They are not supposed to promote a false position which undoubtedly garners easy votes but does not lift people out of poverty in the long run.
Therefore, ordinary people deserve to be told the honest truth that a business man who becomes successful and rich does not by so doing, make other people poor. That is the kind of thinking we only associate with failed Marxist revolutionaries such as Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong and Hugo Chavez. It is a line of thinking which pits a fellow citizen against the other and in the process engenders class envy.
Much is made of the fact that some of our successful business people arrived poor on our shores. . It is sad that we persist with this cliché as if it shows that by becoming successful business people, that then is and of itself a despicable thing. Its befuddling that we seem to be livid and wondering how dare they come here and make it!
The question which we should be asking ourselves is why we have limited opportunities? Instead of answering that question, the best that we could muster is the so called Economic inclusion bill which is premised on forcing successful business to offer their time and resources to other businesses. It has culminated with the power of the state being used to usher in this disastrous piece of legislation
We have to learn from history because those who don’t are bound to repeat it. We have seen what happens when governments fiddle with the idea that the root cause of poor economic growth and job creation is a dominant business class which excludes others. Such thinking leads to ethnic hatred as we saw in East Africa. The very people who were at forefront of driving out business people in the 70s are now begging them to return almost a generation later
We have limited opportunities because the government is not prepared to reinvent itself by introducing free market reforms. It is not prepared to reform anything, So the government owns this problem of lack of economic opportunities What, for example, has it reformed since 2019 ? Nothing! Even something as noble as a shuttle bus between Gaborone and Francistown to cut government waste has not seen the light of day.
If at all the government is committed and not merely paying lip service to economic empowerment, it could have awarded many of the multibillion Pula public infrastructure projects around the country to citizen owned firms. Instead, they all go to Chinese state owned firms. If the argument is that citizen owned firms lack capacity to execute projects of such magnitude , why then would it be good to force private firms to engage them if the government does not.
The Economic inclusion Bill is not going to resolve our lethargy when it comes to supply side reforms. We are not willing to privatize our expensive state owned enterprises. None other than the IMF has been beating this drum for years. Instead we have decided to bury our heads in the sand and now busy blaming fellow citizens for their success.
