FNBB engages gov't on economic constraints
Mbongeni Mguni | Monday September 15, 2025 10:37
FNBB is comfortably the country’s biggest bank by all metrics, boasting a customer base of more than 700,000 and a loan book of P20.6 billion as at June 2025. For the year to June, FNBB’s pretax profits rose six percent to P1.9 billion, defying the toughening conditions in the domestic economy as well as the continuing liquidity crunch in the financial market.
The bank’s CEO, Steven Bogatsu, told BusinessWeek that the current difficulties in the economy required all hands on deck, and the bank had made representations to the government on possible solutions.
“At FNBB, we believe that the challenges that are besieging government should not just be admired or that we should just sit there admiring the challenges. “We should be folding our sleeves and assisting. “We have knocked on the doors of the responsible ministries, for instance, health,” he said.
Bogatsu said FNBB was proposing public-private partnership engagements in areas such as facilitating arrangements in infrastructure, reaching out to manufacturers, helping with logistics and others. The arrangements would piggyback on the bank’s own network of contacts, clients and connections locally, regionally, and internationally.
“We have machines and equipment in various health posts that are gathering dust because they don't have spare parts, they don't have the right technicians operating them,” he told BusinessWeek on Wednesday. “And so some of the models that we have proposed include bringing in a supplier to government with the bank, and instead of government procuring this equipment, it rents it from the manufacturer, and we come in to finance.”
Bogatsu explained that in such a scenario, the benefit to government would be that it no longer had a machine lying idle because a technician could not be found.
“When it’s a rental agreement, a technician will always be availed, and even if the current technician resigns from government and joins the private sector, the manufacturer of the machine will always be there to make sure that they avail a technician. “Again, the manufacturer will always ensure that the spare parts are availed in the country so that the machine doesn't gather dust because it's waiting for spare parts. “And thirdly, the benefit that government will always get from this will include the fact that the latest machine will always be availed to government so that at any point in time, we don't have to send people across the border, patients across the border to get these services.”
Bogatsu said FNBB had worked on other types of public-private partnerships in different jurisdictions and was willing to bring the expertise into the country for government’s review.
He said the bank was also willing to partner on logistics, leveraging its wide range of clients operating in various areas of the country.
“We can partner with them as a bank in order to ensure that if there are any stumbling blocks around logistics, those can be unblocked for the benefit of the citizens around the country. “Also, we have service providers as well as clients who are international, if there is any need for us to help identify other manufacturers who may be our clients overseas or who may be clients of our partners who are service providers. “We have this huge network that we can be assisting with so that we don't struggle at any particular point with manufacturing of drugs and other things that are required in the medical space,” he told BusinessWeek.
Bogatsu said the bank was pleased with the reception from government, and engagement was continuing on different proposals. One of these includes the recent investor roadshow featuring 13 projects under the Botswana Economic Transformation Programme that the Finance ministry floated before investors last week.
The investors included banks, asset managers, and pension funds.
“It has actually been encouraging that government, through the Ministry of Finance and the Vice President, has been reaching out to the private sector,” said Bogatsu. “We have committed to more engagements, just based on the 13 projects and others, and the posture that we are seeing from government is an encouraging one that allows all of us to actually not just fold our arms and say it is a government problem. “They have allowed us to come in and play the role that we should be playing in order to advance the economy.”