BotswanaPost facing extinction � Molefhi

Pauline Dikuelo | Friday August 1, 2014 14:16

Speaking recently at a meeting with parastals under the ministry, Molefhi blamed the latest technology for the state of the post office business.

He said the introduction and growth of technology such as Internet, email and mobile phone communication have pushed postage and letters to the brink of obsolescence.

“We are facing an era where postal services are not economically viable. For example people no longer send money through the post office, as they prefer the efficient ‘my-zaka’ and orange money. Even the emails have affected the box mail totally because these days everything is done online,” Molefhi said.

Recently when presenting their results for the year ended March 2013, BotswanaPost chief executive officer Pele Moleta stated that the parastatal was not doing well.

He said unless government capitalises the Post, it would go down, as loses stood at P76.3 million and P13 million was needed for operating activities.

“We have been negatively affected by the delays in the decision to revise tariffs and to grant Botswana Post the authority to borrow and operate in the open market.

This has negatively impacted our cash flow and day-to-day operations.” Moleta added.

Moleta said that government has provided written assurance that it would continue to provide the necessary financial support.

Several years ago BotswanaPost started investing in core IT infrastructure after realising that the business landscape and competition were generally influenced by technology.

They geared some efforts to ensure that counters at all post offices were fully automated such that all the transactions are centralised.

Still on their mission of driving towards its Icon of Excellence Strategy, BotswanaPost further embarked on more initiates like the launch of pre-paid electricity service agreement with Barclays Bank, the POSOPAY, an e-commerce portal that provides service and products including third parties online as well as the Poso Cloud last year in October.

But all these did not make any difference, as BotswanaPost remained one of the loss making government parastatals, which has been posing a burden on the fiscus.

This forced the government to revamp the parastatal through the implementation of a merger with Botswana Savings Bank.

Statistics Botswana data indicates that the average amount of domestic mail received fell slightly from 191 articles per 10,000 people in 2000 to 169 in 2010. The amount of foreign mail received and sent from Botswana plummeted from approximately 9.9 million items to 3.2million.

During the same decade, the average amount of foreign mail received per 10,000 people in Botswana declined from 42 to 15, while the average amount sent dropped from 18 to three.