Keorapetse trashes Serame’s unemployment feat
Mompati Tlhankane | Monday February 13, 2023 06:00
Serame, in her 2023 budget speech this week, said she was pleased to note that preliminary data released by Statistics Botswana in January 2023, indicate that unemployment declined slightly to 25.4% in the fourth quarter of 2022.
“We saw a small decline in unemployment, falling from the post-Covid peak of 26.0% in 2021 to 25.4% in the fourth quarter of 2022. On the economic front, we have made insufficient progress in the critical task of diversifying exports, while unemployment remains relatively high.
The 2023-2024 budget, therefore, has to balance our objective of spurring economic activity and achieving higher growth, while managing these and other domestic and international challenges,” the minister said.
Serame indicated that their plan as the Botswana Democratic Party-led government is to reduce unemployment and eradicate abject poverty. She revealed that unemployment rate has regrettably risen during NDP 11, from 17.5% of the labour force in 2015 to 22.2% in 2019 and further to 26.0% in 2021.
The minister stated that the increase is partly attributable to the impact of COVID-19 although she admitted that even before then, unemployment had been rising.
“According to Statistics Botswana in their Quarterly Multi-Topic Survey Quarter 4, 2022 released in January the extended unemployment that is, the combination of actively seeking and not seeking employed persons in the reference period, stood at 328,926 in Q4 2022,” Keorapetse said on Wednesday in his response to the budget speech, adding that accelerated job creation programme should be a priority.
“Of these, 74.4% were actively seeking work and 25.6% were discouraged job seekers. Secondary education holders were dominant with 60.1% of the unemployed, followed by university graduates and primary school holders with 12.5% and 11.5% respectively.” Keorapetse said this is what Serame celebrated as “tangible results” of the recent surge in economic growth.
The LoO emphasised that contemporary Botswana’s economic challenges remain unemployment and underemployment which exacerbate poverty and wealth and income inequalities and limit access to economic opportunities. He said slave wages have resulted in a high population of the working poor. He also indicated that the high consumer prices alongside weak economic recovery following COVID-19 and high unemployment rate have effectively put Botswana in a state of economic crisis.
“Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) takes a position that one of the fastest ways to grow an economy is huge scale infrastructure upgrade, not what is being done by hiring Chinese companies which then repatriate all their profits because Botswana abolished their foreign exchange controls in 1999,” he said. Keorapetse also pointed out that as the UDC they suggest absorption of all interns and Tirelo Sechaba participants into the public service, some agencies of the state and parastatals.
He added that they take a view that SMMEs are an important job creation vehicle, much more than bigger companies can ever do because they have more flexible production opportunities compared to large enterprises.