Botswana has brought a butter knife to a poverty fight whilst its antagonist – unemployment – has brought a grenade. For 58 years, government has been preaching empowerment, social welfare, and social security support, but after almost six decades since Independence, the time has come to question the real meaning of this old song.
For the financial year 2025–2026 government plans to raise its social welfare programme spend from P2.88 billion to P6.48 billion, an increase of over P3.6 billion. These social interventions, though not ‘evil’ or wasteful in their nature, can be strategically re-deployed to win the war against unemployment and inequality. After all, is unemployment not the greatest ill Botswana faces?
The economic whizz kids of the world, whether located in the Emirates or the Asian Tigers, do not ring the bell of welfare; instead they chime the bells of economic capital investments that have turned into wealth creation for their citizenry.
They have prioritised economic production as a key focus area for expenditure rather than gross welfare support for their citizens. This then begs the question: should the vast downtrodden population burn to ashes so that Botswana focuses on industrialisation? The answer was better shared by one of Botswana’s former Cabinet ministers and bright minds, David Magang, who, in his book titled Delusions of Grandeur, opined that while there is a balancing act required to navigate this complexity, outright welfare support cannot be the answer.
“Firstly, having come this far, government cannot now discard the rope that it long fetched to hang itself with,” Magang said.
“At the same time, I am not fully persuaded that welfare expenditure should be fully dealt away with,” he added. The truth is government has set a bad precedent for its economic interventions, many of which could have been targeted at economic growth, were anchored on social day-to-day sustenance, while at the same time draining the government coffers.
This is not to suggest that funds meant to support orphans, the differently abled, and the poor are wasteful. But there are better ways to spend the funds in a way that allows these citizens to participate more fruitfully in economic activity.
Latest figures in the government’s draft Estimates of Expenditure released by the Ministry of Finance show that government will continue its trend of ballooning social welfare support in the form of “community projects” and reformations to the “Ipelegeng programme”. “The TEC for the programme needs to be increased by P3,600,000,000 from P2,878,500,000 to P6,478,500,000 for the implementation of social welfare programmes such as Ipelegeng, Constituency Community Projects, amongst others,” the estimates revealed.
The welfarism herein explored is not limited to funds explicitly labelled as welfare. A closer look at the way government is run also reveals a benign welfarism approach to running government.
For example, government sees its public sector human resource more as a way to keep Botswana working, refusing to lay off some in other sectors or reduce wages as government continues to work with a bloated workforce.
Of the forecast spending of P97 billion for the upcoming financial year, just over P35 billion will be used on personal emoluments and pensions, the majority of which is for civil servants’ salaries.
For the 2022–2023 financial year, government expenditure stood at P74 billion with the largest portion of this amount going to civil servants’ salaries and associated expenses, a decades-old trend that has weakened the budget’s back.
Government has been kicking the can of fixing the public wage bill down the road for many decades, mainly due to the cushion provided by diamond revenues and healthy reserves.
Now, authorities are warning that the time for hiding their heads in the sand was over, as a fiscal drought besets the nation.
The reason why government would ever consider layoffs to create room for capital investments is because public sector employment serves as a guise and form of welfare. Another obvious welfare expenditure is government’s obsession in maintaining and running state-owned enterprises or parastatals. This is another extension of preserving more than the necessary jobs out of fears of the consequences if people are laid off. Debates around public sector reforms are particularly abrasive, as they could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of jobs and livelihoods. And yet, these particular reforms are amongst the most urgent as they directly impact upon the establishment of a private-sector-led economy.
While a parastatals shakedown was announced last year, the pace of the changes has been minimal, with critics saying that expecting some of the tougher reforms to be implemented in the run-up to a general election, was unrealistic.
At the last count, the country had 64 parastatals spread across the different ministries, with the majority of these loss-making and having been in such a state over many years, draining the ever-shrinking billions of pula annual budget.
In recent years, many of the 17 commercial parastatals have sunk even deeper into the red, becoming totally reliant on government support, whilst some of those which previously supported themselves have also drifted into losses.
The World Bank this week noted that the pressure on the budget is not the worst challenge posed by parastatals. In a 73-page assessment known as a Systematic Country Diagnostic, the World Bank critiques the government’s stance on parastatals as part of the “many current policies that are not aligned with the country’s urgent need to enhance private sector growth and competitiveness”.
“The state participates in markets in which other countries tend to promote competition,” the World Bank stated. “The Country Private Sector Diagnostic demonstrates that competition in sectors such as energy, beef, and transport is dampened by the large public sector footprint and the preferential treatment of some state-owned enterprises.”
In fact, parastatals are sometimes welfare for the rich. They are graft opportunities to sustain the welfare of corrupt tenderpreneurs and executives.
Another sublime welfare spend that needs not be overthrown but rather reviewed is the government’s funding model for free education and free healthcare. The citizens certainly cannot bear the true cost of healthcare and education, but government certainly must not bear the burden alone.
Last year, when government was facing revenue challenges, parents all over the country made a loud outcry about being forced to buy books for the children they brought into this world.
Government should pay teachers, provide basic infrastructure and maintain it, but parents must have a contributory role to play in sharing the cost, like buying books. Worse still, the obligation associated with government-funded student loans for first-degree studies is barely being repaid.
The idea that governments should simply be bystanders stems from a culture, a cancer even, of dependency on government.
Even on healthcare, most Batswana do not pay the required P5 for accessing healthcare. Citizens even complain when asked to buy books to be used in place of health cards for keeping records of their own medical and treatment history.
The economy’s biggest risk is not dwindling diamond revenues but rather highly dependent citizens who the government is not willing to have a real conversation with.
