This past few weeks areas around mainmall in the capital Gaborone have been getting what the city council probably terms as phase lift. The mall itself its getting some of the pavements painted. Like during the 50th Independence in 2016, we will not be shocked if the trees are painted. All these are done in preparation for an upcoming Forbes entrepreneurial summit. If all these were real phase lift, one would wish that Forbes come to town each and every month.
The Gaborone phase lifts – whether real or perceived reminds one of the once beautiful dream our nation had about our Gaborone as the nation’s capital city. We were to turn Gabs into a diamond city.
In that dream, Gaborone was to be transformed into a tourism and investment hub with world class infrastructure.
The dream gained traction several years ago when former Vice President Ponatshego Kedikilwe, then at minerals ministry announced a new diamond deal with De Beers which dictated that “diamonds mined here” should be “polished here”. We started to have so many imaginations as result of that deal.
These were of course positive imaginations of what should or could come out of such a huge and sudden change in diamond trading. Since the main talk was about De Beers’s Diamond Trading Centre relocating from London to Gaborone, we had imagined that as a country we would do certain things differently as a way of meeting even the barest minimum standards that international business people that come here expect.
In our imaginations this included keeping our streets and main roads free of cattle and other livestock. These imaginations were guided by the thinking that foreigners who visit our country, more especially Gaborone either to do business or to buy our diamonds come from countries that have functional road lights. We have, however unfortunately already exposed these people’s lives at danger due to livestock roaming the city from the airport down into Phase 2 location up to Tlokweng border.
We should therefore, for now, excuse all the first time visitors, including those who are coming for the Forbes summit who may mistake our Gaborone to a cattle ranch, or a cattle post. But as we excuse them, we should at the same time remind ourselves that we live in a supremely interconnected and interdependent global economy. One that is highly competitive for investment.
Gaborone as part of the SADC bloc has traditionally faced stiff competition from developed metropolitan such as South Africa’s Johannesburg and even peer cities such as Namibia’s Windhoek. Even developed cities like Nigeria’s Lagos who continue to experience grand surges of growth are still luring investors to their side.
We are in competition either directly or indirectly for these people who have money to invest in our respective economies and hire our people or at bare minimum impart knowledge to them.
For us to get investors to Gaborone we need to get the basics right. Our star point therefore is making the city clean. Well done to Gaborone City Council for its recent clean-up campaign. One hopes it won’t stop immediately after our Forbes friends are gone. But of course, cleaning up is not just litter-picking but also keeping livestock away from our streets.
Studies show that investment, trade flows and commerce thrive in safe environments, where the law is supreme and applied impartially. It is high time that owners of livestock that do not only cause death but also chase away prospective investors should face the music.
As a capital city, Gaborone’s contribution to the country’s GDP is certainly high and notable. So as we prepare to host our Forbes ‘friends’ later this month we should bear in mind that our national story cannot be rewritten if Gaborone is not “turned around”. The future of our city is a turning point for the domestic economy and only with a good strategic turnaround plan will Gaborone truly become a global city to rival all others.
The #Bottomline is that global cities, like countries, thrive on “soft power”; the power to attract. We are sorry to say the obvious….our city is so far not as attractive as it should be. Let’s strive to turn things around so as to present Gaborone as an ideal business destination as well as a world class city that we have always dreamt of having –a diamond city.
