No future without energy

| Thursday September 23, 2010 00:00

Everyone including government has been forced to engage in austerity measures. In cutting down on projects, we hope government will be mindful of the key strategic areas such as energy so that these are not sacrificed under the guise of saving wastage.  Any country that is unable to generate its own power to supply its economic and domestic needs will not prosper. We have good experience of this.  Over the last two years when the country was plunged into sporadic power outages as power was rationed from source in South Africa.  This affected industries and many businesses have never recovered from the losses that they incurred during the time of outages. It is in this light that we encourage our leaders to be circumspect in scaling down on major projects such as power generation.  In the past, the philosophy of government, particularly when the economy was under the stewardship of Festus Mogae, the thinking was that the country should be efficient and import some of its needs including agricultural products, power and other utilities because it was cheaper to do so.  We learnt the hard way that this philosophy is flawed in a number of ways. No country depends on another for a strategic interest such as power. 

We want to implore the authorities not to scale down on this all-important project using cost as the only consideration.  Botswana is growing and there is no doubt that today's demands will be outstripped in the future.

The best policy is to start a power plant that will lead to power self-sufficiency into the distant future.  In our view, it does not make sense to start a power station using loans only for it fail to meet power in a fewer years.  We would strongly urge the authorities to tread very carefully on this issue. In our view there is nothing wrong to have an over-supply of power which could be sold to other countries anyway.

Human rights defenders

The European Union delegation in Botswana deserves a big pat on the back for having created a platform for human rights defenders in Botswana. In a democracy such as Botswana, it is important that we have people that strengthen our democracy by speaking against, pointing out and working towards the restoration of human rights coalescing as one.  Often, these people or groups come up against the might of the state. It is important that human rights defenders focus in what they do because they offer a critical service in the lives our people.  Human rights defenders help government to correct and align public policy to the benefit of all. Human rights defenders bring hope where there is none. Although governments would want to wish them away, human rights defenders help to fine tune governance.  For the many things that they do, human rights defenders need a platform to compare notes and to learn and encourage each other for their path could be a lonely road.

                                                                 Today's thought

The only thing necessary for the persistence of evil is for enough good people to do nothing - Amnesty Sayings

                                                                (unknown origin)