The constant singling out , stereotyping and berating of some of our fellow bona fide citizens in the last two years for the sin of being economically successful , has finally paved the way for an Economic Inclusion bill. The Bill is set to reach the floor of Parliament momentarily. This bill it must be said, is not only tragically naïve, but sweeping in its coverage. It is not out of kilt however with anything that claims to be inclusive. Inclusiveness after all, is the latest buzzword which means nothing really.
It is said for example that “This Act shall apply to all sectors of the economy, the State and its related state owned entities and agencies (public body), and any private sector employer that plays a significant role in economic empowerment.” It is not clear what is meant by a “significant role”.
The trouble with this bill is that it lacks a proper setting and is therefore ahistorical. It is as if we are just starting off as an independent nation. We are in 1966. It is as if the government has not been around for 55 years with sufficient time to evaluate and assess the impact of our myriad empowerments schemes.
So the Bill is developed in a vacuum and it must have taken a really audacious policy wonk somewhere around the hallways of Government Enclave, to attempt this remarkable feat of social engineering. This social engineering is, under the guise of economic inclusion, predicated on providing support to what the social engineers call a targeted citizen without bothering to define what that really means. So our targeted citizen will be a moving target.
The bill seeks to appoint an empowerment czar otherwise known as a Coordinator. This czar will then, on the basis of undefined metrics decide on who becomes a targeted citizen and who does not. So the determinants of a targeted citizen vis-à-vis a non-targeted one, will be based on the whim of the Empowerment czar. And that being the case, the Bill stipulates that a ““targeted citizen” means a citizen whose access to economic resources has been constrained by such various factors as may be determined.” It is that vague
But Botswana is not a new country and the founding leaders developed a series of empowerment programmes. We have to recognise that the first leaders of Botswana did not just fold their arms and gaze at the ceiling. They hunkered down and crafted schemes such as BEDU and Financial Assistance Policy (FAP) to promote and inculcate entrepreneurial skills among citizens. In 1974, the Tribal Grazing Land Policy (TGLP) was developed to promote commercial cattle ranching among Batswana famers. The other key objective of the grazing policy was to “safeguard the interests of those who own a few cattle or none at all.”
In the 90’s, the Government also set up a Citizen Entrepreneur Mortgage Assistance Equity Fund (CEMAEF) – to “mitigate the process whereby citizen investments in commercial/industrial properties and land facing foreclosures by the lending institutions are easily acquired by non-citizens.”
I bring up all these schemes to show that our forerunners worked very hard to empower citizens. If you also take into account the amount of money that has been spent on education and health, you begin to discern a dedicated and concerted effort to provide opportunities to citizens. It was on that basis that the government moved a step further in its 1990 Incomes Policy and declared that” , ‘’virtually everything Government does will be subservient to the employment creation objective”. In other words, the greatest form of empowerment is job opportunities for citizens. That’s sadly is not the metric of interest to purveyors of the Economic Inclusion Bill. They are interested more in bean counting than anything else. The idea that the targeted citizen will be not allowed to sell his business to an untargeted citizen for example, shows how unserious this Bill is. Who doesn’t want to extract maximum value from their business?
