We need to evaluate the efficacy of some parastatals

It is not the first time you are hearing this from us; many of our parastatals are not worth the investments put in them.
And if some of them were allowed to run with decisions based purely on commercial reasons many would close down.
This is not to say that we do not need these parastatals. But quite to the contrary!
Many of our parastatals were created for social reasons when the private sector was so weak that it would not be trusted to carry the burden of, say, providing water or energy.
The truth is that the same reasons that led to Government establishing many of the parastatals continue.
Our biggest problem is that while the terrain on which the parastatals exist has altogether changed over the last 40 years or so, parastatals have themselves remain shiftless.
It is not an exaggeration to say that some of our parastatals while created to stimulate economic development, in theory have now become a hindrance to the same.
This is mainly because the same parastatals have not only become powerful but also indispensable behemoths that owing to their monolithic sizes are not able to timely change and anticipate events in today’s ever changing┬á economic situations.
That is not the only reason.
Because they know that they have a guarantee from government, which always behaves like a bank and indeed financier these parastatals have resisted all calls for them to run along commercial lines.
Every year there is a photo opportunity for many of the parastatal CEOs to parade before the media as they make pronouncements of how much in dividends they are declaring to government as the shareholder.
The truth of the matter is that we are still to see good enough amounts of dividends to be enough justification of the amounts in investments the shareholder has planted in these various institutions over the years.
Again this is not to say that parastatals should be judged on how much they declare in dividends since some of them play roles that are much more social and economic than commercial.
But still in times of these it should be viewed as the insult it is, when a parastatals into which government has ploughed billions over a stretch of decades can only declare a paltry P24 million as was the case with one parastatal last year.
We need not emphasise that while money was until five years ago not so much a big issue for Botswana government, it all of a sudden has become an issue because of eroded diamond sales.
Naturally during these difficult times government is right to now look at its other investments it has made over the years to augment the dwindling public finances. And one such big and obvious investment is the parastatals.
But are our parastatals coming up to the party by way of filling the void?
We do not think so.
The more worrying aspect though is not of making financial contribution to public finances. Rather it is the way these institutions are now standing in the way of progress especially by frustrating the private sector though the use of their anti-competitive practices coupled with their abuse of privilege that they are owned by a powerful government.
Many parastatals were created as either natural or statutory monopolies.
That was only good for as long as the private sector was almost non-existent.
But we now see the parastatals abusing their regulatory strengths to literally make sure that the private sector remains weak or that whatever semblance of private sector there may be, it remains beholden to them.
Government has in the recent past done a tremendously splendid job in streamlining, merging and evening shutting down some parastatals.
Unfortunately the number of parastatals has not necessarily gone down because some new ones have also been created.
It may be time there is a national debate on the continued efficacy of some of the parastatals we currently have.