One of Botswana’s keenly watched rising thought leaders is a 26-year-old economist whose conversation swings easily between development challenges in rural Motopi, her home village, and some of the most complex high level economic stuff such as government budgets, public debt, international trade ÔÇô that kind of thing.
Bogolo Kenewendo is part of an informal brain trust that Botswana National Youth Council’s executive director Benjamin Raletsatsi has assembled to advise him drive forward Project 50k, his ambitious plan to influence the creation of 50 000 new jobs over the next five years through fostering a spirit of entrepreneurship among the youth. Though initially reluctant, she eventually agrees to meet me to share her views on some issues that impact on the economic prospects of young people. She’s fits the bill for the task because not only is she a young achiever herself, but she also has an impressive history of working with young people to empower them ÔÇô something she calls a passion.
“You know, you don’t realise as you get old that you are losing people who are 10 years younger than you; you don’t have the same experiences. But I think our decision-makers are still running on their experiences as young people, and trying to satisfy the needs of the current young people. I don’t think ba dira ka bomo. I just think you think you have been young before and you understand the needs of somebody else, but the needs have changed. We are living in a completely different and dynamic world that every time you need to go back and find out what’s happening rather than just go with your sense or your past experiences as a young person,” she explains the apparent disconnect between young people and decision-makers, especially in political leadership.
The situation, she states, calls for consultation. And by consultation she is not talking about the usual setup where some important-looking people from Gaborone call a meeting in some outpost, sit at a high table while one of them makes a PowerPoint presentation, followed by questions and comments from the floor, and ÔÇô of course ÔÇô lunch.
“I’m talking of real consultation,” she says. “We need some real engagement and I think government also needs to have youth advisors. When they came up with the youth parliament back then, I thought it was good idea, but then it failed, I don’t know why.”
She believes the two government ministries that urgently need youth advisors are those of Youth, Sport and Culture, as well as Presidential Affairs and Public Administration.
Kenewendo points out that it creates a problem that the youth is often lumped together as one homogenous group, without regard for distinct challenges, especially those that come with the urban-rural divide. To illustrate this point, she refers to her home village.
“My challenges,” she says, “are not the same challenges as, say, my cousin who is the same age as me but who still lives in Motopi; they are completely different. I have access to all this information; I can tap onto my computer anytime I want to pick up some information or anything, really. And remember that in our villages there is a challenge of electricity, there are network challenges, and so information is very, very limited.”
Then she mentions the deplorable education standard in the rural areas, largely on account of neglect because most teachers don’t want to work in there, while those who find themselves in such areas spend more time in personal pursuits such as farming. You tend to understand why she states that there is need for a special focus on development in rural areas. One intervention that she suggests is to increase public officers in rural areas, especially youth officers.
To an inquiry whether Botswana is failing its youth, she states that “it’s a dark decade, for sure”.
“I have read a lot of articles that say we are a lost generation because when you are 21 and you are supposed to find a job there are no jobs, and when the job finally comes when you are 31, a 21 year old is now smarter than you are because they are just out of college and had better education; you have no work experience and you have to compete with that younger person just leaving college. Being a lost generation won’t increase any productivity, efficiency, or economic activity in this country in the future,” she says.
But against such a bleak assessment, she also calls it a fantastic time to be a young person in Botswana because there are a lot of opportunities. If young people took the time to read, she asserts, they would find that there is so much they can do.
“If Botswana is failing you, tap onto Zimbabwe, tap onto Zambia because there are opportunities everywhere, and the government of Botswana and everywhere else in the world the focus right now is [on] youth, primarily because they see the youth as being failed,” Kenewendo advises.
She observes that the lack of jobs has increasingly driven young people to view entrepreneurship as a first option. The downside is that most want to be millionaires overnight.
For young people, the road to entrepreneurship is riddled with hurdle upon hurdle upon hurdle. Chief among these is the bureaucracy that one has to endure to register a business, taking up to 10 days of queuing in different offices. The second is access to funding ÔÇô whether to start up or to expand an existing operation, leading to a high failure rate within the first two years. Well, let’s say you find the finance, but there is something else you have to contend with ÔÇô the market itself.
“I have learnt that the market in Botswana is not very responsive to new things,” Kenewendo observes. “We might be responsive for one week, [or] two weeks, then we are done; we go back to our usual habits. So you have to assess what it is that the market needs, not wants, because you know the wants can disappear, especially as the wages are being eroded…..So when you try and come up with a business idea focus on what you think people really need.”
In the drive to inculcate a spirit of entrepreneurship among young Batswana, she advises that some fundamentals have to be reassessed. One, the education system has to be realigned to produce problem solvers, not people who graduate because they were good at memorizing textbooks. Two, empowerment programmes ÔÇô such as Economic Diversification Drive ÔÇô must not breed dependency and complacency for local businesses, but must help them to outgrow government assistance and be in a position to be export-oriented. Three, for far too long Batswana have been inward-looking, and they must now begin to look at the world as their stage.
While most of us choose our careers, it appears in Kenewendo’s case economics chose her. Aged about 16 and in senior secondary, her commerce teacher made her enter an essay competition run by the Bankers Institute of Botswana. She won the best overall prize, and the ceremony at which she was to be presented with the award was hosted by Bank of Botswana.
“That was my first encounter with economists,” she laughs.
She was seated at the same table with big hitters such as Governor Linah Mohohlo and Keith Jefferis, at the time one of the deputy governors.
“There was the former president, Rre (Festus) Mogae, who is also an economist; so that ceremony was really just economists and I was sitting at that main table with these people and I kept asking them, ‘So what do you do exactly? What did you study?’ ÔÇô and my conclusion was ‘oh these great people in this room studied economics, I am going to do that too’.”
And she did ÔÇô graduating from the University of Botswana with a BA single major in economics. After a year’s break from work on a Chevening Scholarship to study for a Master’s in International Economics at University of Sussex, in Britain, she is back at Econsult Botswana, the economic and development consultancy where her mentor and colleague is Jefferis, the former central bank’s deputy governor.
