Vision 2016 was a good dream

Mmegi Editor | Thursday April 24, 2014 12:04

The publicity manager of Vision 2016 council, Charity Kgotlafela said targets such as total poverty eradication, no new HIV infections and zero unemployment rate are among those that are impossible to meet.

It is human to accept failure.

We want to also state as a matter of fact, the vision was a good dream envisaged by the leaders of this nation. Even at individual level, we set targets on what we want to achieve within a certain period of time. Sometimes we achieve such goals, and in other instances we fail.

For instance, when the United Nations set the Millennium Development Goals more than a decade ago, there was something to be used as a yardstick to shape the thinking, policymaking, and planning.  They wanted nations to have a common vision to guide them as a collective and as individual states. It produced good results; the world is a better place today than three decades ago.

The same can be said about the targets of International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) adopted in 1994, which will be extended in a few months time. There may not be 100 percent achievements, but the fact that there was a guiding document to harness thinking and planning and resource allocation should never be overlooked. From the leadership of Boutros-Boutros Ghali, Kofi Annan, and now Ban Ki-Moon, the UN did not only preach MDGs and ICPD targets, they embraced them. They promoted the ideals alongside other important goals such as everlasting peace in the world, eradication of diseases, reducing maternal deaths, and providing safe water for all people in the world.

Coming back home, former president, Festus Mogae preached Vision 2016 wherever he went, in the same breath as HIV/AIDS prevention, no new infections, and other challenges that the country was facing. In short, Mogae embraced Vision 2016 though he inherited it from his predecessor.

The vision pillars rest on establishing an educated, compassionate, caring, prosperous and law abiding nation. Failure in achieving the aforementioned could be attributed to a number of factors such as the current leadership, which appears as if they never embraced the vision.

Education is in crisis, unemployment is high, and people are made to believe that gifts of blankets and soup are the solutions to the myriad problems in life. Instead of enacting laws to make shelter a human right for all, we have resorted to begging from, or rather blackmailing businesspeople into donating houses and clothing to the poor, before parading them on TV.  Vision 2016 was a good tree; but it was destroyed before it bore fruit.

                                                             Today’s thought

                                 “He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander”

 

 

                                                                -Aristotle