Anglo American Boss Graces Ub Foundation Dinner
Innocent Selatlhwa | Monday September 12, 2016 15:37
The guest speaker at the dinner, themed, ‘Natural Resource-based Development Strategy: An Assessment of Botswana’s 50 year Experience and Prospects for the Future’ was Mark Cutifani, a businessman and CEO of Anglo American. Cutifani hailed Botswana for having grown significantly economy wise and in education over the past 50 years. He called on the UB alumni and other stakeholders to continue supporting education and skills development across schools and the society. He noted that in 1966, there was about 40 university graduates and about 100 secondary school graduates in a population of around 600 000, and today there are more than 20 senior secondary schools, primary education enrolment rate is in excess of 90%. “That’s impressive and something that every Motswana should be proud of.”
He said due to good management of diamond resources with long-term goals in mind, Botswana has one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Cutifani said it is intellectual capital acquired through education that Botswana has achieved this.
He praised Botswana’s Presidents for the country’s “remarkable success story” stating that investing in education is a gateway to lots of opportunities to diversify education including investing in technical and vocational education and training. For his part, deputy Vice Chancellor Academics Professor Martin Mokgwathi acknowledged that even though the university has made strides with an almost perfect record of producing some of the best graduates, there is still room to do more. “We face challenges that we can only overcome with the support of friends and supporters who we have here tonight, we have realised that to attain high levels of excellence, an institution must recognise and reengineer itself and strive to be even better,” he said.
He said one couldn’t deny that public investment in universities has some impact on their quality and their future contribution on execution for future decency and prosperity of the country.