As testimony to what the European Union believes about Botswana’s financial position, its development funding for the country in the next cycle (2014-2020) is Ôé¼100 million less than was disbursed in the last (2008-2013) cycle.
“You may ask, ‘Why is Ôé¼100 million missing’?” quipped Herrmann Spitz (Head of Sector, Botswana Cooperation, EU Delegation) at a journalist seminar that the Delegation hosted at Sanitas Nursery and Garden Centre in Gaborone.
The answer he provided is one that we have become accustomed to: having graduated to upper middle-income status, Botswana’s financial need is not as great as it was decades ago when it was still languishing in the lower income rungs. On such basis, international donors have, by degrees, been scaling down the amount of money they give the country. The EU’s main instrument for providing development aid to African, Caribbean and Pacific countries as well as to overseas countries and territories is called the European Development Fund and has a lifespan of six years. In the particular case of Botswana, Spitz said that the EU is still preparing EDF 11 and at this point is using funds from EDF 10. From the latter, which ran from 2008 to 2013, Botswana got Ôé¼132.8 million but in EDF 11 (2014-2020) the funding has been whittled down to only Ôé¼33 million.
Rather than provide development aid money, Spitz explained that the EU will instead focus on skills and knowledge transfer that the country so desperately needs to transition from a commodity-based to a skill-based economy. To satisfy such objective, one very important area that the EU is focusing on is education and human resource development. The EU is supporting the implementation of the comprehensive education sector plan (the Education and Training Sector Strategic Plan) which, according to Spitz, “has a systematic approach to solving the challenges in the sector.” The EU provided technical expertise in the development of the ETSSP which to be implemented between 2015 and 2020 and is part of effort to “strengthen the match between qualifications and labour market requirements.”
Spitz revealed that the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning has also embarked on a public finance management (PFM) reform programme with the support of the EU in the form of technical assistance.
The programme has to deliver on key goals such as prudent fiscal decisions, credible budgets, reliable and efficient resource flows and transactions, and institutionalised accountability. Citing a real-life example to buttress the point about credible budgets, Spitz said that the programme would ensure that money allocated to government ministries and departments during a particular budget cycle is actually used and not returned unspent. This is an issue of grave concern and has been the source of scepticism about the economic stimulus package (ESP) which the government introduced two months ago. Through the ESP, the government is injecting billions of pula drawn down from foreign reserves into a system that over decades has proved itself incapable of using money efficiently. The credible-budgets regime that the EU is helping MFDP implement would correct this anomaly.
Another anomaly that this programme would correct relates to government spending on tertiary education institutions as described in the ETSSP. This is not an example that Spitz gave but one well worth mentioning in this context because it shows the extent of budget inefficiency in the government system. The Plan shows that the training of a primary school teacher at Tlokweng College of Education over three years costs P145 000 more than that of a lawyer over five years at the University of Botswana. The ETSSP attributes the high cost and poor performance of the education sector in Botswana to a “complex mixture” including: poor budgeting and financial management, poor allocation of resources, over-design of institutions, inefficiencies in public investment and poor project management (resulting in cost-overruns), under-investment in primary level education, underutilization of capacity in some institutions, poor maintenance, over-crowding and poor human resources management which altogether culminate in poor total factor productivity. It recommends that a comprehensive study on unit costs for all levels of education to “accurately inform prudent budgeting and equitable resource allocation.”
Outside the government, most of the remaining support to Botswana’s education sector comes from the EU which provided a total of Ôé¼71.359 million between 2009/10 and 2013/14. Out of this amount, Ôé¼68.665 million was for budget support. For 2014/15 to 2016/17, it is expected that a total of Ôé¼47.207 million will be disbursed for education; of which Ôé¼45.360 million will be budget support.
EU support extends to what it calls “non-state actors” among which are non-governmental organisations. In the current funding cycle, the Union has budgeted Ôé¼5.7 million to the civil society and the money will be used to both “strengthen structural relationships” and empower these actors. If Botswana’s elevation to upper-middle class economy and the consequent flight of donors was bad news for the government, it was worse news for NGOs who are totally dependent on donor funds. Many (if not most) Botswana NGOs collapsed and received wisdom is that this had to do with resource depletion occasioned by donor flight. Conversely, Spitz cited institutional capacity (“very very weak”) as the major problem that most of Botswana NGOs face.
“When one key person leaves, the whole NGO crumbles,” he said, adding that most Botswana NGOs don’t have cooperation networks.
The Bushmen pressure group, First People of the Kalahari (FPK), may be a good example to illustrate such characterisation of NGOs. With supporters in European palaces (Prince Charles), legislatures (Lord Pearson of Rannoch in the House of Lords) and media houses (BBC’s World Affairs Editor, John Simpson) as well as in Hollywood (X-Files star, Gillian Anderson), FPK was so well-resourced that at the height of its power, it owned a sophisticated radio system that it used to communicate with its network of international supporters when need arose. However, trouble was bubbling underneath such perfect appearance and it burst to the surface nine years ago when FPK leader, Roy Sesana tangled with then Coordinator, Kgosimontle Kebuelemang, over unauthorised absenteeism. Following heavy rains in 2007, Sesana thought it would be a good idea to leave his duty station at the FPK office in Gantsi, go to his home settlement of Molapo and “plough two hectares.” What turned out to have been a bad idea was neglecting to notify the Coordinator about absence from work over an extended period of time. When Kebuelemang called him for a disciplinary hearing, Sesana baulked and his explanation to Sunday Standard at the time was that he wouldn’t deign to subject himself to the authority of someone junior to him, someone whom he “found” stuck in a dead-end job at Gantsi Craft (“found” as you would a lost coin) and thrown a more financially rewarding pity job. Two years earlier, Sesana and FPK had won the Right Livelihood Award along with its equivalent of P400 000 prize money. However, the money was frittered away in no time and FPK found itself in dire straits soon thereafter. Explaining how that partly happened, Sesana claimed that one male employee (who reportedly went to bed “with a cellphone jammed between his thighs”) ran up an astronomical telephone bill by making ceaseless trans-Atlantic lovey-dovey calls to a new girlfriend in the United States.
Asked to explain why it was not capacitating FPK staff to handle administrative and financial matters properly, Survival International ÔÇô a London-based lobby group which at the time was FPK’s main sponsor, said that it was not its place to interfere in the running of tribal organisations it supports globally. With the key person in FPK (Sesana) now a government employee, the lobby group has collapsed.
In the context of the future model of EU assistance, NGOs will be capacitated with skills and according to Spitz, “there is a lot of work that needs to be done to develop standards.”
