UK party drills Umbrella

EPHRAIM KEORENG
Staff Writer | Tuesday June 26, 2012 00:00

 

Speaking at a press conference in Gaborone yesterday, the coordinator of Africa Liberal Network, Nick Branson, said they were impressed by the contribution of the participants of the two-day workshop that was held over the weekend.  The workshop focused on competencies a leader should have. Branson said BMD participants, who included leaders and ordinary people, had shown a good democratic value of trying to develop cadres, thus enabling people to rise to positions of leadership.

Also speaking at the press conference, the Liberal Democrats' head of Candidates' Office in the UK, Tamsin Hewitt, said they worked on identifying competent leaders who were to make sure that they candidates came from a cross section of socio-economic backgrounds.

She noted that one should not become a candidate simply on the basis of their being highly connected or wealthy.

When they came to the workshop, 'we didn't come with the idea of what the competencies or good leadership in Botswana context is', Hewitt said. She explained that the BMD national executive committee and members of the Umbrella had spent a whole day working on a framework that would work for Botswana, as a toolkit for good leadership.

'On the second day, we shared the framework with various activists from across the country and they agreed to adopt it and we asked them to practice it and spread it across the country,' she said. The Liberal Democrats campaign manager, Austin Rathe, said the framework looked at qualities such as integrity, resilience, having a vision, effective communication and ability to mobilise people among values that should be identified in a good leader.