The case for an executive mayoralty

A BBA degree and extensive business experience under his belt, Mayor Haskins Nkayigwa fails to understand why a potentially wealthy city like Gaborone should ever have money problems. "Gaborone has over 500 open spaces that it can use to generate money, but it is not exploiting that opportunity.  The council has serious shortage of staff houses when it has land in abundance," he says. He finds it stupefying that Gaborone City Council's advertising space can earn advertisers millions of pula from billboards while the council itself gets next to nothing.

"Most of these guys are millionaires: they can make P100,000 a month while the council gets as little as P2,000. We currently charge for the area of space leased out when we should be getting a percentage calculated on actual income earned as happens in other cities," he says.