Monday, November 4, 2024

Government justification to outsource NDP 10 is disingenuous

This week, Members of Parliament took the Assistant Minister of Finance to task over a curious decision by his Ministry to hire a firm of British consultants to coordinate the formulation of NDP 10.

As in the past, Duncan Mlazie lamely explained the reasoning behind his Ministry’s actions by saying the Ministry does not have in house capacity.
As we understand it, the hired firm of consultants will bring two people to do the job, which the Minister says will take 24 months, at a cost of P3 million.

The mister said one of the “experts” has previously worked for the Ministry of Finance while the other has had a stint with the research think tank BIDPA (Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis).

The Minister also told parliament that the Bank of Botswana had been approached to second their staff but could not, also for capacity constraints. The same applied to BIDPA.

Instead, BIDPA offered to use their data base to come up with the British firm of consultants, curiously going by the Setswana name, Mokoro Pty (Ltd).

We have in the past complained that national budgets are, by their very nature, undemocratic.
This is not an issue of irrational nationalism as Mlazie so painstakingly tried to make it look like.
Rather, it is a matter of taking ownership for those things that ultimately map out our destiny as a nation.

This is not a matter that can easily be contracted out to foreign companies and then get a senior government official to casually explain it in such disingenuous terms as those made by Minister Mlazie.

National Development Plans are the centerpieces of Botswana’s economic planning.
National Budgets are drafted based on the National Development Plans.

If the Ministry of Finance cannot coordinate and produce an NDP then what reason do we have to maintain such a huge and costly bureaucratic machinery?

If they cannot coordinate an important document such as an NDP, then God knows what other instrument they will be contracting out next.
The importance of a National Development Plan to the very economic existence of this country cannot be over emphasized.

We need not remind the Ministry of Finance that the peculiarity of Botswana as an economic success story, when put side by side with other developing countries in Africa and beyond, has always hinged on the structured development paths that, from day one, were mapped out by National Development Plans.

If we derail from that course (which has served us so well as a nation), we should not be surprised if we go astray and become like hopeless economic cases like many other development countries.
It is, therefore, in our view, indisputable that preparations, formulation and not least coordination of such an important roadmap as the NDP is done by people whose grasp of our values and customs as a nation is beyond question.
It is our opinion that the coordination of NDP should be done by people who are own, people whose grasp of our ambitions, history and traditions is not questionable.

This is again not an attempt to cast any aspersions on the expertise of Mokoro consultants that Minister Mlazie talked of in such glowing terms.
Again, this is not an issue of nationalism, least of all a lecture on citizen economic empowerment.
It has nothing do with patriotism.
It is about common sense.

More importantly it is a reminder to government that certain things are better left to citizens of this country, who better and more innately understand the undercurrents of some of the most emotive dynamics of our make up as a nation, to sort out.
The Minister’s excuse that the Ministry of Finance does not have internal capacity to coordinate a National Development is one of the most bizarre and outlandish reasons we have heard in a long time.

We have always known the Ministry of Finance to be the cream of government when it comes to attracting brainy technocrats, hence the deep seated arrogance and negative attitudes that has traditionally radiated from its top mandarins who have always looked down upon their counterparts in other Ministries.

If the Bank of Botswana and BIDPA could not produce two experts to government to help coordinate the NDP 10, we want to believe that the Ministry should have approached the Departments of Economics and that of Public Administration at the University of Botswana to second for the duration of two years, the required amount of experts to fill in the vacuum.

Over the years, through the University of Botswana, the government of Botswana has produced some of the best academics in the world, at some of the most prestigious universities in the world.
It is only fair not just to these academics, but also to the nation that has invested in these academics that they are put to proper use, especially when the nation desperately needs such expertise as that talked of by Minister Mlazie.

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