Businesses urged to exploit opportunities in mining
Isaac Pinielo | Wednesday October 11, 2017 15:16
During a business development forum yesterday, BCM projects manager, Joe Ramotshabi indicated that a lot of money is spent by the mining industry on procuring goods and services from foreign suppliers.
He suggested that the purchasing power could be used to develop and diversify the local economy, attract foreign direct investment (FDI), facilitate citizen economic empowerment and job creation. As such, Ramotshabi said BCM seeks to facilitate cost saving potential and creation of local strategic suppliers.
“Our vision is to be the leader in creating and nurturing competitive enterprises in the mining and related industries,” he said.
He also said BCM intends to facilitate local entrepreneurial development in the mining and related industries through leveraging the mining purchasing power in the best interests of its members and stakeholders.
To accomplish this, Ramotshabi said BCM set up the business development forum whose membership consists of the procurement, supply chain management, and materials managers at the different mining operations.
“The main focus of the forum is to utilise the combined mining sector purchasing power to drive cost saving and efficiency improvement initiatives for the BCM members,” he said.
He also noted that the forum seeks to make significant contribution towards the country’s socio-economic development, as well as attract foreign suppliers to relocate their manufacturing activities into Botswana or to establish local trading presence within the country.
“We embrace the citizen economic empowerment drive and provide support to capable citizens and citizen-owned enterprises to grow and supply local and export markets,” Ramotshabi said.
The project manager further stated that more should be done to encourage indigenous businesses to take advantage of the procurement and manufacturing benefits.
He indicated that there are potential opportunity areas for citizen development and empowerment, for supply and manufacturing and for joint ventures and FDI attraction.
“We should encourage attraction of FDI by luring foreign suppliers or investors to invest in Botswana, which is import substitution and the creation of local supply capacity,” Ramotshabi said. He also spoke of the need to give serious attention to rehabilitation of existing local companies as well as local enterprise capacity building interventions to assist companies to meet market requirements. He said companies should explore greenfields for new products, new companies and exploitations of untapped business opportunities.