Cabinet reshuffles... the strike and poverty eradication

*BOITSHEPHO BOLELE | Friday May 20, 2011 00:00

To be honest the reshuffle by the President was very appropriate and has redeployed the ministers concerned according to their experience and area of strength. The President was spot on in deploying you as the Assistant Minister of Finance; this is the ministry that houses the rural development agenda; In addition it is the contact point for development partnerships such as the EU, ADF etc.

These are the hotspots that tie very well with your experience in development: especially that you have worked first as an academician, a policy advisor then a development practitioner - both locally and regionally; you have set in the board meetings of these Funding partners and you have met with the rural communities under trees and in classrooms, so you know for yourself the challenges of these partnerships and the real issues on the ground.

As we celebrate your appointment, I would like you to remember; remember your maiden contribution in Parliament; your concern with the institutional framework for poverty eradication; to quote you '....currently the national coordination and planning is at the Ministry of Finance while the political muscle is at the Office of the President; and the local institutions that deal with poverty on a day to day basis : the likes of VDCs are at Local Government; the NGO Policy, which could help define the relationship with potential civil society partners is with Labour and Home Affairs'. Your argument was that what needs to be done is to have a National Coordinating Agency that will operate as a trust and take direct responsibility for bringing all poverty programmes together at all levels...you have the skills, the experience, the passion and now the executive power to do just that!

I believe that the President has the grace of God - he loves the people of God: the poor and the excluded. I somehow believe that had he not taken a personal interest in these people, some settlements that are not even noted in the maps of Botswana no matter how detailed - would have fallen out of government programming.

However, this strike is hitting them the most: the rural folk, the young and the elderly, the poor and the excluded - it is these people that are feeling the heat more than all of us.

Formally employed people are on medical aid: it's the poor who find the clinics closed, a day without the doctor is a day too late for most of the people especially with digajaja tse re mo go tsone; it's the poor whose children are back from school and mind you the school feeding programme is part of poverty eradication etc etc.

I therefore urge you, in the spirit of Budget Pitso to join your team in ending the impasse; in your esteemed ministry, you could revisit the projections to identify which projects to suspend, so that money can be found to increase the salaries of the civil servants. Maybe this strike does reveal the limitations of the Budget Pitso, maybe the process could have been more open; maybe in the final analysis the budget estimates could have been finalized with the input of the critical stakeholders etc etc. The damage is already great; lots of money will be needed (millions) to rehabilitate the culture of the civil service after the strike, to rehabilitate the youth... the opportunity cost is huge, it therefore warrants the suspension of major road works, just for example, just to pay the workers and get back to normalcy. Secondly, the implementation of the NGO Policy. NGOs face the danger of going under and can only be saved by the NGO Policy of 2004. If operationalised it would see government legally bound to fund NGOs. As a scholar of democracy you need no persuasion on the crucial role NGOs play in strengthening democracy.... And delivering services to the excluded and the remote.I wish you well, God bless you!