To enhance its operational efficiency, the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning (MFDP) should be split into at least two ministries. One ministry should therefore be responsible for finance and budget administration while the other is responsible for economic development planning.
The need arises from the important functions the ministry plays in the national economy.
The ministry is currently mandated to coordinate national development planning, mobilize and prudently manage available financial and economic resources.
Further to that the ministry is responsible for the formulation of economic and financial policies for sustainable economic development.
The core functions of the ministry fall into three main areas of treasury and budget administration, economic management and national development planning as well as financial administration and management.
The ministry in addition plays supervisory role over a number of equally important wholly government institutions such as Bank of Botswana (BoB), Botswana Stock Exchange (BSE), the Non-Bank Financial Institutions Regulatory Authority (NBFIRA), Motor Vehicle Accident Fund (MVA), National Development Bank (NDB), Botswana Unified Revenue Service (BURS) and others.
All these roles are by no means menial. They are enormous and demonstrate the extent to which the ministry is overstretched.
It is only prudent that the ministry is split into at least two ministries to lessen the burden that it is currently carrying. In fact this is why government found it fitting that the ministry should have a minister and a deputy with no less than five secretaries and directors.
With Botswana’s economy steadily growing, the splitting of the ministry into more than one would no doubt help ensure that both ministries’ capacities are optimized and prudently managed.
While it may have been prudent in the past to have the multi-faceted ministry undertake all those responsibilities, the same could not be said to be still applicable today. In the past the country’s budget was a meagre millions as opposed to today’s billions of Pula. This just goes to demonstrate the extent to which the economy has grown. It is indisputable that Botswana’s economy has been growing in leaps and bounds.
The economic challenges of yester year are not the same as the economic challenges of today. Botswana has grown from a low income to a middle income country and all efforts are geared at exalting the economy further to a high income country.
To avert a situation where we will in the future accuse the ministry’s heads of failing to steer the economy in the right direction, it would be appropriate to streamline the ministry’s functions now rather than later.
It would be flawed if we underestimated the roles that the entire ministry currently plays.
As earlier stated, prudent economic and financial management is no small task. The cumbersome structure of the ministry is responsible for its failure to deliver to expectation.
The ministry is extremely important to our national agenda and it would be folly of our political leadership not to realize this.
Proper economic planning will help us avert the pitfalls that many of our African colleagues have fallen into.
As more graduates are churned out of the education system, they must be able to find conducive environment in which they can set up self-sustaining enterprises without enduring bottlenecks that often frustrate their dreams.
With government slowly reducing its involvement in the economic sphere, the regulatory framework should be accommodative and supportive of the private sector’s endeavours in steering the economy forward.
As the government moves to reduce its bloated civil service, all efforts should go towards creating an environment that is not prohibitive to doing business in the country, but one that rather facilitates the development of a private sector that has potential to absorb those to be offloaded from the current system.
