It has always been accepted that the best way out of poverty is by creating wealth.
From that wealth, it follows that there will result in employment creation.
That is the path that has been followed by countries that have been able to reduce poverty, most notably Brazil, which, like Botswana, is by all accounts still a developing country.
We want from the start to point out that in Botswana poverty is real and that it is right and proper for the government to want to do something about.
Having said that, we also want to point out that we should be careful to do it right, lest we exacerbate what is already an unmanageable concern.
Our view is that the best way to reduce poverty is by creating wealth.
Under the present circumstances, it would seem like the preoccupation is redistribution, a kind that is not very different from the soviet era bolshevism.
Until there is a clear acceptance by government that the government budget should be used to empower citizen entrepreneurs, the eradication of abject poverty shall remain a wild goose chase as for every citizen uplifted there shall be two or more joining the poverty ranks, not least because of growing levels of unemployment, especially among the youth.
A way has to be found to create wealth, beyond just selling diamonds.
While what the government is doing may be morally correct, the underlying economics point to the fact that it is in the medium terms not sustainable.
As we speak, the cake that the government is redistributing is getting smaller by the day.
Unless a way is found to increase that cake, it goes without saying that there will come a time when government will have no resources left with which to end the abject poverty.
This brings us back to the issue of why it is important that while we adopt poverty eradication as our latest social security fad, we also should, on the other hand, not lose sight of the importance of creating wealth.
Botswana is one of the very few countries in the world where a government is by far richer than the sum total of all citizens’ wealth put together.
This is not something to be proud of.
Rather it is a time bomb the net effects of which we are seeing right before our eyes when so many people live in abject poverty and squalor yet the state has tons of money which, owing to lack of imagination on the part of leadership, the country does not know how to spend to recreate wealth.
It is not clear that as a country we can create wealth for as long as there are underlying perceptions that somehow there is something wrong with being wealthy.
We have to be upfront in teaching ourselves as a people that there is nothing wrong with being wealthy, especially when such wealth is clean and well begotten.
At the moment, Batswana seem to accept it as normal when other people other than their own make money, but are somehow sceptical when it is one of their own creating the same amount of wealth.
As a newspaper, we have always been unapologetic in emphasising that this country needs to create more millionaires.
And, in our view, it is not possible to create lasting millionaires without creating a new class of industrialists that are homebrewed enjoying national goodwill rather than envy as is currently the case.
More importantly, it is our view that poverty can only be reduced, at least to sustainable levels, if people can be employed gainfully.
What we need at the moment is an honest public debate on whether the initiatives by government to reduce poverty by 2016 are workable.
In debating such initiatives, we should not personalize issues, especially around the president as that can only harden attitudes and make government more averse to flexibility and less willing to review their policies.
Romanticising poverty and its reduction, by taking millionaires to travel around the country as poverty tourists, will take this country longer to reduce poverty.
