The high ambitions of the Transformation Strategy
Lewanika Timothy - Mbongeni Mguni | Thursday February 29, 2024 13:49
Under the tonnes of strategies, policies, projects and billions of Pula announced in the recent budget, lies the principle objective of improving the livelihoods of Batswana. Under that principle indicator is the basic, primal need to be happy.
The Ministry of Finance measures “happiness” through economic growth and associated sub-indicators such as employment creation, the level of wages, rate of growth in prices and other numbers. For technocrats there, the goal is essentially to ensure that opportunities and incomes in the economy keep up with the level of growth in the population, over time.
For the average man on the street, happiness is just that – happiness.
“The World Happiness Report reflects a worldwide demand for more attention to happiness and well-being as criteria for government policy,” researchers at Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network say.
“Life evaluations from the Gallup World Poll provide the basis for the annual happiness rankings. They are based on answers to the main life evaluation question.”
With a target of up to 3,000 respondents in each country, the World Happiness Report researchers ask survey participants to think of a ladder and rate which rung they are on in terms of their lives. The best possible life is a 10 and the worst possible is a zero.
The Report is therefore both self-assessed and perception-based and for years, Batswana have ranked themselves as amongst the lowest of the low. For 2023, Botswana was ranked 132 on the World Happiness Report out of 137 countries. The DRC, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan are some of the countries which ranked lower than Botswana.
The National Transformation Strategy unveiled this week, hopes to turn the situation around. Known as the NTS and covering the years 2023 to 2030, the publication is described as a “single reference document for existing national strategies”. It incorporates the RESET and Reclaim Agenda, Cabinet Strategic Thrusts, the Economic Recovery and Transformation Plan, the Smart Botswana Strategy and other development initiatives.
For the National Planning Commission (NPC), which is coordinating the rollout of the NTS, the new document provides detailed guidelines for the high-income economy dream.
Part of this involves strategic pillars and their associated targets, an approach which is to be expected as the NPC was born out of the amalgamation of entities such as the Vision 2036 Coordinating Agency, National Strategy Office and others.
Rather than stick to the hard and fast targets that usually emanate from technocrats at the Finance Ministry, the NTS has refreshingly also included the more “man in the street” aspirations such as pure, primal happiness. The NTS is a therefore a balanced development view of economic, social and political indicators from all three aspects of development.
The target of rising from the 132nd most unhappy country to at least somewhere in the top 20, can be found under Pillar 4 which focuses on Governance, Peace and Security.
“By prioritising these aspects, Botswana aims to create a safe, secure and peaceful nation, which is a crucial outcome for the country’s overall well-being and progress,” reads the NTS.
But how exactly will “more happiness” be created in the country by 2030?
According to the NPC, the NTS is anchored on its first pillar, Sustainable Economic Development, whose achievement will cascade to other pillars and targets.
“Sustainable Economic Development covers everything that we want to achieve such as a high-income economy, economic diversification, private-sector led growth, greater productivity and others,” NPC commissioner general, Batho Molomo said on Monday.
“Our mandate as the NPC is to provide leadership on planning, implementation coordination and performance monitoring.”
The targets under the Sustainable Economic Development pillar will help “make Batswana happier” and perhaps because of this, the bar has been set high.
Under the NTS, annual real economic growth is seen at six percent each year by 2030, a steep target considering that the only times in which annual economic growth passed this level in the last decade was in 2016 and 2021. ON both occasions, this was the arithmetic result of deep contractions in 2015 and 2020. Instead, according to Mmegi’s trend analysis, real economic growth in the decade between 2013 and 2022, has averaged 3.94%, far below the NTS target.
The NTS also aims to see substantial restructuring of the country’s budget drivers, with non-diamond exports targetted to reach 39% percent of GDP by 2030, compared to 12% as at 2022. The new strategy also hopes to see the non-diamond sector record real average annual growth of 6.4% by 2030, from 4.74% at the moment.
Other targets cover global competitiveness, spending on research and development, digitisation, annual Foreign Direct Investment as a percent of GDP and others.
The NTS cuts across ministries and will inform National Development Plan 12, which in turn will guide the annual budgets between 2025 and 2030. The NTS, therefore, when delivered according to target, will technically usher in the high-income economy dreamt of by the country’s technocrats.
Between the unveiling of the NTS this week and the glorious hope of 2030, however, lies a mountain to be moved.
Not only is the NTS attempting to do in a few years what previous plans over the decades have failed to achieve in successfully diversifying the economy, but it wants to do so at a time of greater geopolitical uncertainty and economic fragmenting at global level. Experts have also cautioned that more COVID-type economic black swan events lie in wait for the world going forward while locally, the country’s financial reserves continue frail, having been battered by the pandemic.
Even if by some miracle, the NTS and its ambitious targets navigate these headwinds, the NPC still faces the burden of effecting a cultural change within the public service around implementation of policies, programmes and projects.
Cynics have described this as being akin to squeezing blood from a stone.
And the NTS appears to agree as one of its targets is to increase the percentage of programmes and projects delivered on time, within budget and according to specification to 70% from the current 13%.
Khumo Mogaetsho, Assistant Commissioner General for National Delivery Coordination at the NPC, this week told Mmegi that upon her appointment to the Commission, she was shocked to learn that over 40 tenders, dating back to 2019, were at a standstill due to lack of firm decision-making. This includes making the decision to cancel projects where it was clear that contractors could not meet requirements.
According to Mogaetsho, weak decision-making structures have caused high levels of inertia in project implementation in Botswana.
“I was shocked to learn that over 40 projects could not be cancelled when contractors failed to deliver because there was no one to say a simple NO to the shoddy work done by contractors. “You wonder why there is no clear action and agility when it comes to cracking down on poor project implementation,” she said.
The NPC is a legislative creature, a fact which distinguishes it from other efforts over the decades within government to pursue targets such as implementation and performance monitoring.
Quizzed on how cultural change efforts will transcend to public service servants who have been blamed for weighing on implementation, Mogaetsho conceded that it is going to be a big challenge to introduce agility into all government structures, due to the non-responsiveness of Batswana at general to change.
“Batswana are afraid of change, and to effect change in all government processes to ensure delivery is not going to be easy. However we are committed to ensuring that change is effected,” she said.
Should that mountain be climbed, then Batswana can look over the peak and begin to see that the NTS’ targets can be achieved. Then, possibly, more Batswana can self-assess themselves as “happy”.