Of the many fading values that served as the cornerstone of yesteryear Botswana, there is one that seems to be dissipating faster than most – the value of self-reliance.
Fables and legend have it that erstwhile Botswana was the simile of a secular economy, where families lived on their wits through subsistence farming supported by a system of barter trade. The downtrodden members of society survived, not on handouts, but through working their way up on borrowed resources, through a system known as “mafisa”.
Many moons later, the bygone days of self-reliance have faded, giving way to a generation that has its eyes on government to nestle them from cradle to grave.
The question is: Did the founding fathers of the country set out to create a welfare state or where there extenuating circumstances that forced them to plant an obviously bad seed?
In the mid and late 1960s the country fell upon bad droughts that shaped the early manifesto promises of political parties, especially in the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) which took the shape of a conservative welfare doctrine.
The droughts added to the pressure on the early doctrine of the BDP government, to articulate the relationships between, and respective responsibilities of, citizens and State.
Crucially, the state assumed responsibilities supposedly undertaken by the chiefs. It also adapted existing understandings of chiefly authority and responsibility to accommodate the new State institution.
The result was a doctrine that represented the State as benign, with clear responsibilities to the poor, but at the same time emphasised the responsibilities of the poor themselves to contribute to their own welfare.
From inception, welfare policies in Botswana have long revolved around three major components: first as cash-for-work; ‘supplementary’ feeding programmes for designated vulnerable groups and additional support for selected categories of people (initially support along the lines of poor relief for ‘destitutes’, and more recently universal old-age pensions and support for orphans.
But what underlines Botswana as a social welfare state? First it is its cradle to grave monetary spending on the provision of basic services to its populace. Upon birth, new born babies will be awarded P300 by the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) government, after which they will be fed with the highly sought after Tsabana and Malutu from when they are six months to five years.
After which they enter the corridors of primary school and are given free education with free feeding until they et to 18 years when they pass on to tertiary and are given a monthly living allowance coupled with a tuition loan they will most likely never pay for.
All this time government is pumping billions to keep this unsustainable system in place, but at what cost?
Welfare spending in the country has been a bottomless hole, with government not having the means of making up for what it spends in welfare services every year.
Unlike the Nordic countries of the world who have high income levels allowing their government to levy high taxes and in turn offer a blanket of social interventions, Botswana does not have the same privilege nor does it stand on the same pedestal.
Instead, government has bred a culture of entitlement from its citizenry who feel entitled to government assistance, a culture antagonistic to that in the Western block where the citizens see themselves as a cog of the greater development agenda.
In its 2011 Botswana Risk Assessment Report, the International Monetary Fund cautioned that the country’s decades old tradition of providing social services posed a risk of skewed expectations that government may not be able to keep up with.
“The government’s long-standing success in providing for the basic needs of citizens may prove a double-edged sword.
“The breadth of state programmes has created heightened expectations and demands will be compounded as the population grows,” the researchers shared.
One of the country’s luminaries and brightest minds, David Magang, in his book entitled “Delusions of Grandeur” shared more emphatically how the entitlement curse plunders this country.
“Personally, I abhor a culture of entitlement, which I unreservedly deplore as it induces a sense of laxity and complacency and to the extent where people who are capable of providing for themselves feel no motivation to improve their lives,” he wrote.
Tracing back the culture of social services, Magang in his recollections, shared that the making of Botswana into a welfare state started in the 1970s with a supplementary feeding programme for primary school-going children, nursing mothers and pre-school going children.
“Rural Botswana was home to over 85% of the population. The Rural Income Distribution Survey found that a great number of rural households did not have cattle at all and depended for their livelihood on subsistence farming,” writes Magang.
“Given the direness of the poverty situation in the country, it is understandable why Seretse (Khama) gave the go-ahead to the supplementary feeding programme.
“Not that Seretse’s government did not overreach itself in its extension of a compassionate hand; it provided only what it could afford under the circumstances.”
Magang further in his book implored government to re-think social welfare expenditure.
“Now that our economy is ailing though not exactly on a drip, the resources that we devote to welfare should be best redirected toward job creation to mitigate the need for Government paternalism” he writes.
Under the presidency of late Quett Masire, welfarism rose. The annals of history have it that his first years in office were ones of sustained droughts, from 1981 to 1986. Arable production fell by two-thirds and 300,000 cattle had died by 1984. The government responded by expanding its drought relief and recovery programmes: feeding programmes were extended to provide meals for school children over weekends and during school holidays; the public employment programme was expanded, and also introduced cash payments alongside food rations; and more generous food parcels were distributed to much larger numbers of ‘destitutes’.
Masire’s then Minister of Finance and Development Planning (and Vice-President), Festus Mogae, announced in his budget speech in February 1996 that non-contributory old-age pensions would be introduced.
In his memoirs published a decade later, Masire wrote that the BDP was aware that ‘traditional’ support systems were withering, especially in the towns, and poverty was growing among the elderly.
‘We discussed the idea of an old age pension scheme for many years,” he wrote.
“By 1996, we felt that we had enough revenue coming from diamonds, and those funds belonged to all Batswana.
“So we discussed it and decided to go ahead.”
The government has since remained torn between its formal commitment to providing a sufficient safety net and anxiety about expanding it too far and too fast.
Globally, when the modern welfare states started to emerge in the 1930s and 1940s, the background was an entirely different one. The socialist economy of the Soviet Union seemed to be highly successful, while the Western countries had undergone a traumatic period during the inter-war years with mass unemployment and periods of hyperinflation.
Both amongst economists and politicians, the belief that markets were able to allocate resources in a rational manner, was at a low ebb.
As several developing countries gained independence from the colonial powers, there was also widespread agreement that the road toward development had to be paved with centralised economic planning.
But since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, capitalism and market forces have stood the test of time in proving that economies are best left to self-regulate and that economies that focus on job creation and industrialisation are the ones best suited to take care of their citizens.
Inefficiencies in public production of welfare services has been seen as a serious problem in many countries, including Botswana. One solution is to privatise some of these services, possibly in the form of exposing them to competition from private firms. But the implementation of such reforms raises several problems, one of which is the rather neglected issue of industrialisation.
In the market sector, the entry and exit of firms is a positive sign that the market is working. In markets for health and social services, the lack of a stable institutional structure could well be a major welfare problem for clients who depend on stable long run relationships.
There have been arguments that attempts to dismantle the public-sector part of the welfare state may lead not only to the emergence of private institutions on a market basis, but also to increased production of welfare services in civil society.
But this privatizing of the welfare state and its institutions can take two forms. One is to substitute private for public formal institutions, that is, transfer of parts of the public sector to the private market sector. Another is to let civil society take over tasks that are presently the responsibility of the public sector.
Whatever the path ahead, it is generally agreed that for Botswana, its widening deficits and weakening economy, decisions need to be made about the extent of the welfare state. These decisions may need to start with a commitment to efficiencies in the current social welfare programmes, before spreading to the uncomfortable conversations about privatisation.
