Ipelegeng Has Lost That Lustre?

| Monday January 11, 2010 00:00

Interestingly, when the programme first took off, with workers paid as high as P1,500, there was a lot of interest and enthusiasm for the programme. The reason for that was clear - the unemployed Motswana at the time saw this money as something worth celebrating. Today the motivation is not there at all. At individual level, what can P400 a month really do for a mother with a family?We hope government would realise that in its current form, the labour intensive public works, or Ipelegeng, is just Namolo Leuba with another name, which has been criticised for so long for not helping much in poverty eradication.

According to government figures, at some point Ipelegeng was employing 40,000 people a month, and the target was to increase the enrollment into the programme to about 60,000, at least according to president Khama's State of the Nation address in November last year.We hope when the government finally revises this programme, they will not adopt a one-size-fits-all policy, which does not take into consideration the expensive nature of lifestyles in urban areas especially.

At the same time the Ipelegeng programme has proved that if carried out well, it can save government loads of money, especially in urban areas where the programme was effective in cleaning up the city at a very low cost compared to the huge expenses the City Councils and Town Councils usually pay private companies.

In Gaborone, the programme has been used to turn locations like Old Naledi, G-West, Maruapula, and Extension 27 into desirable neighbourhoods, but people cannot continue to labour so much for so little.

We hope that in response to the much publicised lack of interest in the programme from Batswana, the government will not as usual call our fellow citizens lazy for shunning the programme, but rather go right to the root of the problem, being uninspiring rewards.