Service delivery revolution inches forward
Mbongeni Mguni | Friday May 16, 2014 17:09
Imagine being able to wake up on any given day and checking your postage mail from the comfort of your own home?
A leisurely stroll in your robe and slippers to your front gate, where you retrieve your letters from your mailbox and peruse them over breakfast.
Gone would be the days of catching a kombi or taxi to check your mail at the post office, or worse, making return trips every other day while waiting anxiously for that critical job application response.
That dream is fast turning into reality for the 1,000 or so residents of Tshane, a dusty village in Kgalagadi North, who have been chosen to pilot the Botswana Post’s home mail delivery service.
Not Gaborone, not Francistown or any of the other urban giants with their concrete jungles and sprawling complexes, but Tshane, a village in the Kalahari whose prominent features, according to Wikipedia, include a primary school and a small airport.
Executives behind the home mail delivery project explain why Tshane could leap into the next era of postage services ahead of its more illustrious peers.
“The logic behind this is that being a rural area, the residents of the plots are likely to be the certificate holders or owners of the plots,” explains one Botswana Post official.
“In urban areas, the person resident on a plot is not necessarily the owner of that plot in many cases. The home mail pilot works through the Addressing Botswana project which seeks to unify the entire national addressing system.” The reason why Tshane has been chosen is the same reason why home mail services will then be piloted in Hukuntsi, Oodi, Crocodile Pools (Notwane) before hitting Gaborone Block 8 and 7.
Transport and Communications minister, Nonofo Molefhi explains that the home mail delivery system is intimately linked to the finalisation of the Land Administration, Procedures, Capacity Building and Systems (LAPCAS) project.
LAPCAS entails the survey and registration of all land parcels in the country in order to have correct information on land rights. By last November, 106,342 plots in 80 villages had been surveyed and captured.
“Once we have registered everything properly, we will assign these plots numbers and street names,” says Molefhi.
In essence, the home mail delivery system depends on a centralised address book with street names and numbers for every plot in Botswana, linked to the name of that plot owner or resident. In that way, an individual’s water, electricity, bank, clothing account statement and any other postage will be guaranteed to land in his lap.
In addition, this amalgamated address information will help service providers including utilities, banks, credit bureaux and others have a single postal address for an individual and a unified criteria for proof of residence.
“Addressing Botswana was initiated after a study discovered a lack of comprehensive system of street names and property numbering,” a Botswana Post document reads.
“The current numbering system in Botswana is not geared to enhance commercial activity or service provision.
“For example service providers with the same customers, such as telecommunications and other utilities providers, have different profiles for the same customer, effectively leaving a lot of room for national level fraudulent activities.”
Molefhi explains the fruits of convenience the project bears.
“We will be taking postage to your house,” he says.
“It will be up to you to build a mail box according to laid down specifications such as waterproofing it.
“For some the mailbox will be at the gate, for others, it will be attached to the house.”
While LAPCAS is only expected to cover 85 percent of plots countrywide by 2016, home mail delivery will not have to wait that long.
“The roll-out (from the pilots) will depend on how quickly LAPCAS covers strategic areas where we believe there are key population numbers,” he said.
“Once these numbers are adequate to sustain that, we will start it.”
In other countries where home mail delivery exists, such as the United States, Canada and even Zimbabwe, instead of the post office existing in shopping malls via post office boxes, it actually goes to citizens via postmen.
For many young children, the ring of a postman’s bell is associated with the excitement of opening the mailbox and possibly finding a letter from a beloved friend or relative.
Home mail delivery in Botswana could initially begin with a communal mailbox for residents of a street, before the house-to-house delivery. Molefhi says postmen are in the future though.
“We may outsource or recruit for it,” he says.
“Once the LAPCAS project is delivered, we will know the resources required.”
For now, only the children of Tshane and their parents will have sight of the new dawn in postal services, while the rest of the country will have to make do with imagining it.