Dreaming of a diamond city
Monitor Editor | Friday June 27, 2014 16:09
This is a noble dream indeed, if not an impossible one for the residents of Gaborone to adopt or share with the city fathers.
The reality most residents face on a daily basis includes uncollected refuse, dysfunctional streetlights, potholed streets, blocked wastewater drainage, overgrown shrubbery and all manner of livestock confidently roaming the city.
This is the real Gaborone: where your child can be attacked and injured by a dog, goat or cow in the vicinity of a shopping mall as modern as Game City!
Dense traffic jams at every rush hour are worsened by the foolhardy road network design, where a destination a stone’s throw away takes 30 minutes to reach.
For the trouble-weary Gaborone resident, the diamond dream is nothing more than a bad joke from a local authority far removed from the reality on the ground.
The diamond dream is indeed achievable, despite the dreary reality extant in the city today.
Despite its lack of mines, tourist facilities or archaeological wonders, Gaborone is the centre of wealth in Botswana, with a far higher GDP than other centres around the country.
It is the seat of government and the first point of contact for the majority of foreign arrivals, including dignitaries, global celebrities and others.
Gaborone is the country’s largest generator of industrial and financial wealth, with these sectors continually expanding wider and deeper through investment and innovation.
Gaborone’s residents are also among the wealthiest per capita in the country, both in terms of numbers and incomes, contributing potentially the highest to national coffers in personal tax.
Indeed our livestock-overrun city is a diamond in the deep already, contributing greatly to the national GDP in terms of output and to Botswana as a whole in terms of the value of human resource.
This contribution, however, is not mirrored in the allocation from the public purse that Gaborone receives on an annual basis for its various activities, as well as the level of autonomy it requires to achieve its mandate on behalf of ratepayers.
The Mayor himself estimates that more than P1 billion is required for the repair and upgrade of roads in the city alone, before other world-class “diamond city” features such as mounted traffic cameras and half-decent Centralised Traffic Control.
Before government is asked to take the blame however, the city fathers themselves need to introspect and ask themselves whether they can indeed be trusted with taxpayers’ funds. Only this week, we heard that a group of councillors was in the wind with per diems they acquired for a failed trip to Sweden!
If the city fathers can prove untrustworthy with little, how can they expected to be entrusted with more?
Today’s thought
“Great leaders are those that are willing to sacrifice their lives for the interest of their communities.”
– Haskins Nkaigwa