BDP Cllr sees unemployment solution in factories
Pini Bothoko | Thursday August 11, 2016 15:37
The youthful Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) councillor raised this concern during the previous full council meeting of the Francistown City Council (FCC).
Kwambala told Mmegi that government is wasting money by funding citizen owned businesses looking at the rate at which they collapse.
He suggested that government should consider setting up factories that could employ many people, a solution, according to him that could end the country’s nightmare of high unemployment.
“It’s time for government to consider coming up with new strategies of addressing unemployment because despite spending millions of Pula annually to fund projects, Batswana are failing to have successful businesses,” said Kwambala.
He added: “Not all people are passionate about being entrepreneurs but some people only just need to be employed.”
Kwambala said Batswana always complain of lack of employment opportunities and blame this on government. He said others blame government for not giving them money to start their own businesses.
He said Francistown’s Youth Development Fund (YDF) budget is around P6 million annually, which could be used to set up factories that could employ a number of youth.
“Here we can consider using this money to set up a sewing factory that can open up job opportunities for the locals and reduce people’s dependence on government for almost everything,” he said.
He said of recent they (FCC) used a lot of money in buying t-shirts and other merchandise for Bots 50 from as far as Gaborone whilst they could have been provided locally.
Kwambala said government through the poverty eradication programme has trained a lot of people that can be employed to operate such factories.