Everyone including government has been forced to engage in austerity measures. In cutting down on projects, we hope government will be mindful of the key strategic areas such as energy so that these are not sacrificed under the guise of saving wastage. Any country that is unable to generate its own power to supply its economic and domestic needs will not prosper. We have good experience of this. Over the last two years when the country was plunged into sporadic power outages as power was rationed from source in South Africa. This affected industries and many businesses have never recovered from the losses that they incurred during the time of outages. It is in this light that we encourage our leaders to be circumspect in scaling down on major projects such as power generation. In the past, the philosophy of government, particularly when the economy was under the stewardship of Festus Mogae, the thinking was that the country should be efficient and import some of its needs including agricultural products, power and other utilities because it was cheaper to do so. We learnt the hard way that this philosophy is flawed in a number of ways. No country depends on another for a strategic interest such as power.
We want to implore the authorities not to scale down on this all-important project using cost as the only consideration. Botswana is growing and there is no doubt that today's demands will be outstripped in the future.
