The call comes at a time when there were a number of nursing graduates, laboratory technicians, and pharmacists who were roaming the streets, but have since been absorbed into the job market to serve their compatriots.The government agrees that there is a shortage, but there are no vacancies. The solution is for those in charge to create these vacancies and get more nurses into our hospitals.The situation is even disturbing in that pharmacies, some of them government or mission-owned, are manned by expatriates, whilst locals are unemployed and wallowing in poverty.
A few years ago government came up with a system of giving preference to locals in the teaching profession, and retiring expatriates who had done their time to take the country to where it is today. The same can be extended to other professions such as health, auto industry, Information Technology and others to name a few.We vividly remember in the late '90s and early 2000s when hundreds of our brothers and sisters left the country looking for greener pastures in Europe and the Americas, at a time when the HIV/AIDS scourge was at its peak.Even today, we still have our young brains, in those countries, who opted to remain there upon completion of their studies because the Botswana Government would not pay them good salaries compared to their expatriate colleagues. This is a wrong approach to this critical health sector.
