We should not be surprised that the government is at pains to communicate a coherent plan as the nation yearns to inoculate itself against the coronavirus pandemic. Once upon a time and true to form, we were bragging to the world that Botswana was poised to be the first African country to vaccinate everyone within our shores. Surely, we have lost our humility.
And this rush to self-congratulate has become our Achilles heel in recent years because we seem to have forgotten that turn and twist as we may, we are judged on our accomplishments. No one judges us on our good intentions or immaculately laid out plans. As a consequence ,we have vacillated between bullish headlines in April about vaccinating everyone to a point where as the Daily News put it this week in a blaring front-page headline: “President appeals for help”.
It is common knowledge however that the government’s track record of providing services as well as executing approved policies and plans has become pretty abysmal. As diamond revenues grew, we did not keep the size of the government in check but allowed it to not only swell but become inefficient too. To add salt to injury, the set up in the civil service is such that no one is held to account for poor performance. Conversely, no one is rewarded for hard work. So whether you work your socks off or merely coast, counts for very little. The end result is a non performing civil service. Examples abound and it is, if you like, a litany of poor service delivery. I decide to cite but just a few
Early this year, I had occasion to chaperone my uncle to collect old age pension payments and was exasperated that the process took over two hours although there were less than twenty pensioners in the queue. It looks like my uncle’s payment centre is not the only one which suffers from poor service provision. This past Wednesday, the state owned daily newspaper carried a story in which the chief of McCarthy’s Rust village, complained about the late payment of Ipelegeng workers’ wages. A spokesman for the state owned paying agent was quoted blaming the delays on staffing shortages which were in turn caused by COVID induced staff shortages.
There is no reason why private service providers cannot be engaged to pay out old age pensioners. The only thing that holds the government back is the high level distrust of anything that -or anyone who -carries a private sector tag. The bureaucrats suffer from a bout of private sector derangement syndrome.
Some businesses which were requested by the government to offer their hotels for purposes of COVID isolation and quarantine are hardly ever paid on time. On average, their invoices are not settled within ninety days. It is not any better either with tractor owners who offer their services under ISPAAD. These service providers would be lucky to get paid on time and many have to ensure debilitating cash flow problems.
Let’s look at public education. Despite the billions of Pula that tax payers pour into the education system every year, outcomes continue to be very poor by upper middle income status standards. We have already seen that private schools produce better outcomes than public schools at almost the same (if not less) cost per student. It is for this reason that who can afford private school fees including public school teachers, send their kids to private schools. Logically therefore, you would expect policy makers to embrace a shift towards private provision of education. You expect them to start perhaps with making government assisted schools such as St Joseph’s or Moeding to become even independent from the clutches of the bureaucrats. That however is not going to happen because of civil servants’ deep seated hatred of the private sector.
Were it not so, private contractors would have been brought in to procure vaccines and vaccinate the population. The nation would be far advanced in its vaccination rates but they hate the very notion of the private sector at Government Enclave.
