The important role that government parastatals have played in the overall economy of Botswana is not an issue to be debated.
But with privatization seemingly stalled, there is need to look at just what can be done to enhance the contribution of these entities to near optimal levels.
Botswana government has invested very heavily in its parastatals.
The idea was not just for parastatals to provide services, but to also pay back on investment, including by way of dividends.
Yet when one looks at the amount of money each parastatal has been paying to the shareholder as dividend, especially over the last five years when public finances where under stress, one is left with no option but to find that these have generally been bad investments.
Even more terrifying is that under these difficult economic times, some of the parastatals are not only losing money but are begging cap in hand, asking government to pump in more cash into their operations.
When they are not asking for more cash injections, they are nudging the government as regulator and shareholder to allow them to raise tariffs.
And in here we are also referring to parastatals that are monopolies, like the Botswana Power Corporation and Water Utilities Corporation.
It has been four years since government said they will allow private power producers.
To this day, a law is still to come before parliament to allow private providers to either compete directly with BPC or, better still, to sell power to BPC in the face of acute shortages that the state owned utility is going through.
Outsiders have often wrongly observed that Botswana is an exception when it comes to resource curse. They say unlike other African countries endowed with natural resources, Botswana has been saved the spectre of wars, corruption, plunder and civil strife.
They attribute all these to good governance on the part of the country’s leadership.
What these observers often fail to point out is that even as Botswana has not had civil wars or financed by natural resources, the country has nonetheless been going through a different way of resource that has manifested itself in other ways.
Because money was for many years not an issue for our government, we are as a nation still living in a hangover of prosperous and economic growth years that may never return.
Austerity is an alien concept when it comes to government wastage.
Our political leaders seem to think that austerity can only be implemented by freezing salary hikes for public servants.
Every day, there are stories of millions that parastatals, like the Botswana Meat Commission and the Botswana Development Corporation, are losing.
It does not seem so to the leadership, least of all the state president who was recently quoted saying that what is happening in BMC is a storm in a tea cup.
The fact that the country is going through the hardest economic stretch since independence, and there are no serious initiatives on the side of leadership to stem the problems because our leaders are used to having it easy is in our opinion a manifestation of just how bad we have been socialized into a life of plentiful money.
Minerals, especially diamonds, have no doubt been kind to Botswana.
But we are now, as a country, unable to overcome the trappings of wealth that diamond money has taught us.
This, in our opinion, is another version of resource curse which we have to deal with, very much the same way that other African countries have been forced to confront the many problems brought upon them by the fact that they were endowed with natural resources.
But just how do we deal with this kind of resource curse, unless we can first acknowledge its existence and its deleterious effects?
