It is a tale replete with all sorts of ironies and begins with the famous friendship of two powerful men.
In a hard-hitting address to the Botswana Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Manpower in September 1997, Debswana’s Managing Director, Louis Nchindo, castigated the government for doing little to promote citizen empowerment.
“Economic development may produce a good result in terms of
growth in Gross Domestic Product, but it will not meet objectives
of human development and citizen empowerment which are vital to our wider, longer-term vision of Botswana’s future,” Nchindo told the BOCCIM businesspeople.
Ten years later, the man who introduced “citizen empowerment” into our national lexicon stands accused in the High Court of criminally disempowering citizens. At some point during his trial, President Festus Mogae will give evidence with regard to how a company owned by Nchindo’s family acquired vast tracts of land in Gaborone North.
In years to come, Mogae’s biographers will record precisely how he embraced and later pushed away a fellow Oxford man. They will also record how, as everybody else in the country, he embraced a term and ideal put on the national agenda by a man whose second name he has trouble pronouncing nowadays.
Every opportunity he got, Nchindo would talk about “citizen empowerment” and when like-minded people bought his idea, “economic” would be squeezed in between. Everybody could talk about how to empower Batswana but Nchindo was not everybody and everybody tended to listen when he got on his soap box about “citizen economic empowerment.”
In his speech to BOCCIM, he actually suggested a systematic approach to that initiative.
“Government should urgently create a citizen empowerment fund
and a citizen entrepreneur support network. It must legislate the
reservation of certain business sectors for citizens and introduce
schemes that discriminate in favour of foreign investors who have
citizens as partners,” Nchindo theorised.
Two years after this speech there was a national conference on citizen empowerment.
Mogae has himself been an advocate of citizen economic empowerment and has used his public speeches to make his position known. In its nature public advocacy is at one level, an exercise in deception because of the discrepancy between walk and talk. Even for presidents, walking the talk is not easy.
Mogae, who lives office at the end of this month, is currently on a nationwide farewell tour addressing kgotla meetings. It has been interesting to observe that as in all previous such meetings, schoolchildren are being disempowered while the president uses the same forum to talk about citizen empowerment. In Molepolole, he urged his audience to buy shares on the Botswana Stock Exchange.
Decades-old practice all over Botswana is that when the president, ministers, MPs and other VIPs officiate at a public function; teachers pull schoolchildren out of classrooms to provide entertainment. The irony within this irony is that, in most cases, the children of people being entertained go to private schools. At such schools, learning takes precedence over providing free entertainment to visiting dignitaries on a daily basis.
Images that Btv has been showing of these morning meetings are of marching boy scouts ÔÇô primary school pupils – “escorting” Mogae into the kgotla and school traditional dance troupes dancing for him and his entourage.
Reversing this situation is classical Catch-22: it is the very people being entertained who would have to outlaw the use of school children in this particular way.
However, judging Mogae’s citizen empowerment legacy necessarily has to extend beyond what happens at kgotla meetings.
There is need to be realistic about citizen economic empowerment and one of the most pertinent questions in that regard is whether the ground is fertile for it to bloom. An economics lecturer at the University of Botswana, Dr. Oupa Tsheko makes the point that citizens are never going to be sufficiently empowered if productivity levels don’t improve significantly. Over the years, the government has come with a number of productivity intervention schemes but research carried out by two of Tsheko’s colleagues in the department of marketing at UB reached the conclusion that in general, those schemes “have missed their target”.
When he became president on April 1, 1998, Mogae, at one point the number one civil servant as permanent secretary to the president, said that Botswana’s civil service was “among the best in Africa.” It took him longer than was necessary but he finally managed to take off his rose-coloured glasses and see the public service for what it is.
Passing through Molepolole last month, Mogae complained about the poor work ethic of public servants.
Under normal circumstances, education (supposing there is no traditional dancing during school time involved) should empower its intended beneficiaries but Mogae’s administration saw record numbers of jobless graduates roam the streets. Invited to give a lecture at the University of Botswana which, as president, he is titular head of, Mogae suggested that studying courses like political science was not going to be helpful in terms of getting a job. Some people rapped him on the knuckles for that comment but a government-commissioned study also found that it is absolutely vital to ensure that academic qualifications are aligned with what the labour market needs.
Virtually all commentators have praised Mogae for the sterling job he did in fighting HIV/AIDS. Not only has he created awareness about the disease, he has also helped in mobilising much-needed funds from around the world. The government spends billions of pula on Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) thus ensuring that beneficiaries are able to continue working and earning a living for themselves and their families. By September last year, over 90 000 patients were enrolled on ART and the government plans to have enrolled 110 000 people by next year.
A report published by the National AIDS Coordinating Agency (NACA) says that the drugs will save the country’s economy from a projected contraction of about 35 percent by 2021. The study, which was undertaken by Dr Keith Jeffries, a former deputy governor of the central bank, suggests that widespread provision of ARVs to HIV positive people through the public health system will offset some of the negative economic impacts of the AIDS scourge. Dr. Jeffries asserts that the provision of the drugs will contribute to raising economic growth, adding a projected 0.4 to 0.8 percent average annual growth over a 15-year period which would be the result of a healthier labour force and reduced negative impact on productivity. He further estimates that in the absence of ARVs, Botswana’s Gross Domestic Product would have shrunk by 1.5 to 2 percent between 2001 and 2021.
On the other hand, there is a view in the opposition Botswana Congress Party that Mogae’s government has outsourced HIV/AIDS management to Americans.
In another quarter inhabited by his detractors, Mogae has been criticised for taking virtual residence in the skies aboard OK 1, the presidential jet. Last year, a skeptical MP raised the question of whether there were any tangible financial benefits that the country had gained from these foreign trips. Yes, it had, said the Leader of the House and Foreign Affairs minister, Mompati Merafhe. The minister said that Mogae’s foreign trips had brought in over P1 billion to fight AIDS and had also helped bring foreign investors to Botswana.
The latter has been helpful in creating employment for Batswana and bringing it closer to its Vision 2016 goal of eradicating absolute poverty. Results of the 2005/06 Labour Force Survey indicate that from 1995/96 to 2005/06 financial years, total employment grew at annual average rate of 4.7 percent from 345 405 to 584 594 people. Formal sector employment grew by 2.2 percent from 298 799 to 305 240 in 2007.
One very big feather in Mogae’s cap is fighting tooth and nail to have the Diamond Trading Company set up in Gaborone. The projection made by Finance minister Baledzi Gaolathe in his budget speech last month is that by the end of this year, 3000 people would be employed in the diamond manufacturing sector. However, what the minister did not say is that working in that sector does not necessarily mean a better life. Much has been said about diamond cutting and polishing companies that have set up in Botswana but not all of them are up to empowering citizens. There are university graduates working for these companies who earn less than P2000 a month.
The national organising secretary of the manual workers union, Johnson Motshwarakgole, says that while Mogae has introduced labour-friendly legislation (like allowing civil servants to unionise) the pace at which change was effected was slow.
Halfway his term of office, Mogae implemented the National Strategy for Poverty Reduction (NSPR). Parliament learned last year that the country has 39 662 destitute persons (12 711 males and 26951 females) who are registered with the ministry of local government and that only 3269 of those destitute persons have the potential to graduate from the programme. Under its Rural Development Council, the government has established the Multi-Sectoral Committee on Poverty Reduction which coordinates the implementation of the NPRS and carries out the monitoring and evaluation of the poverty alleviation programmes. Among those programmes are ones in which the government tries to stimulate economic growth through farming subsidies.
Botswana’s poverty rates have declined from 46.6 percent in 1985/86 to 30.2 percent in 2002/03. A further decline in poverty rates to 23 percent by the end of the planned period in 2009 has been projected. Wealth distribution figures show that over the years, the bulk of national wealth has gone to the top 20 percent of the country. In 1985/86, 67 percent of the national wealth was in the hands of the top 20 while 80 percent had to share 33 percent. The figures did not change in a 1993/94 study but in 2002/03, the top 20 had 70 percent of the country’s riches. A government economist says that each time Botswana’s economy has grown, the gap between the rich and poor widens.
One very interesting view that has been offered with regard to Botswana’s inequitable distribution of wealth is that such wealth is simply not in the hands of Batswana (leaders included) for it to be equally redistributed.
“The wealth distribution is certainly not skewed in favour of Batswana; in fact, not many Batswana are millionaires in dollar terms. A bulk of the top 20 percent will comprise of people from outside the country. If you see a Motswana driving an X5, chances are he would have financed the purchase with a bank loan,” says Tsheko.
Why that has to be so, Tsheko explains, is that at independence Botswana inherited a national economy slumped against the ropes and had to invite moneyed investors from outside. Those expatriates now control the economy, he says.
When he presented his budget speech, Gaolathe said that the challenge is to ensure that the NSPR is fully integrated into the objectives, policies and programmes contained in the National Development Plan 10.
Citizen economic empowerment also received attention in another arm of government during Mogae’s tenure ÔÇô parliament. In 2001, parliament carried a motion by Mmadinare MP, Ponatshego Kedikilwe, that proposed the establishment of a statutory body to coordinate and monitor citizen economic empowerment schemes. However, that recommendation was never implemented and last year, Shoshong MP, Duke Lefhoko, asked the government to introduce a citizen economic empowerment policy “as a matter of urgency”.
The MP said that over the years, we have had many budget speeches and many state-of-the-nation addresses that have continually referred “to this abstract thing called citizen empowerment”. It was time, he added, to move away from this “political expedience” to actually come up with a concrete policy framework.
“Once we have a policy in place, then we can start talking of measurable results. For now I insist ÔÇô and I would be glad if someone would prove me wrong ÔÇô it has just been a nice catchy phrase. While in itself, it is an important tool of giving Batswana ownership of their country and ownership of their independence, political independence comes to naught if citizens don’t significantly own their economy,” Lefhoko said when tabling his motion. He made it clear that the people he wanted empowered are indigenous Batswana.
He added that the country did not have to look far for examples of best practices. Next door in South Africa and Namibia, indigenous people are being economically empowered, ironically by using administrative systems and processes which Botswana helped set up.
“The permanent secretaries for the Republic of Namibia were trained here. They learned here and they have taken lessons from us but they have surpassed us. All I am pleading is that we should play catch up because it will not be for the benefit of the people of Botswana only. It will also benefit the region,” he said.
He held up South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) model as something that Botswana should aspire to.
“In South Africa they say any company that wants to do business must comply first with BEE conditions. There is no equivocation,” he said.
Lefhoko’s motion was also carried but as in the case of Kedikilwe’s motion, the executive arm of government (headed by Mogae) has yet to act on parliament’s recommendation.
Generally, implementation has been a major problem in Mogae’s presidency. The obvious result has been to disempower citizens. Tsheko says that the establishment of the Government Implementation Coordinating Office could help ameliorate this problem.
To the extent possible for him, Mogae hoed his row. He did not score 100 percent in that test and Tsheko says that one of the major challenges that Khama will face in his presidency would be empowering Batswana.
On a personal level it is interesting to note that as he travels around the country in his farewell tour, Citizen Mogae is being economically empowered by Batswana with livestock (no donkeys please), agricultural produce, art pieces and hard cash. This empowerment is implemented at lightning speed (all it takes is a trip to the cattlepost, ploughing field or bank by benefactors) and no high-priced western consultants are being used.
