While admitting that privatisation is not a panacea to all ills and challenges facing the public sector in improving service delivery, the PEEPA chief was however confident that the policy was one of the most effective policy options for enhancing service delivery by providing the additional capacity and improving efficiency and productivity in the economy.
He was vague on the failed experiences evidenced by massive unemployment and poverty as a result of inevitable retrenchments in the name of downsizing, rocketing prices of basic foodstuffs, high costs of basic utilities that have been privatised. He was also unclear on the weakening of the state’s capacity in relation to multinational corporations buying state assets, where the state is reduced to a mere watchman of private assets and diminished allocative power and interventionist role of the state economy as was the case in Zimbabwe under the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP).
Galeforolwe defined privatisation as not only the transfer of ownership of public enterprises to the private sector but also as being all measures and policies designed to strengthen the role of the private sector in the economy. The objective, he said, was among others, “the need to enhance the country’s growth potential by providing opportunities for development and growth of the citizen business sector and attracting inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) and technological transfer”. He said what was missing in the Botswana case is the debate on how the policy could best be implemented to optimise the achievement of broader national objectives while simultaneously safeguarding public interest and accommodating the concerns of labour.
Galeforolwe further enunciated different perspectives on privatisation from the economist, private sector, labour, government and public sector perspectives. The economic perspective, he said, sought to identify services that could be carried out more efficiently by the private sector through competition and giving customers a choice and benefit through price and quality. He cited the case of the liberalisation of the telecommunications sector in Botswana in the 1990s with the licensing of mobile phone operators, resulting in the growth of telephony services from 40 000 subscribers to about 520 000.
In the end Galeforolwe argues that these conflicting positions need to be aligned rationally in the context of national macro-economic interests being placed above the interests of all prejudiced parties.
