"The chain stores that set up shop in the country took many of our affiliates out of business because they came with better management skills and qualified personnel compared to cooperatives which were run by people with little or no business acumen," said Shabani.Shabani, who is also chairman of the Botswana Cooperative Society, is nostalgic of the days when the cooperatives were the 'bread basket' of many in the country, especially the rural poor who depended on subsistence farming for a living.
Shabani sees the implementation of the Cooperatives Data Analysis System (CDAS) - a strategy meant to resuscitate cooperatives to make them competitive business entities after their collapse - as a lifeline that will take the cooperative setup back to the '90s when they were operating profitably and ordinary people could investment in them.The strategy will soon be rolled out throughout the country.He said a lot of the country's qualified youth roamed the streets without doing anything meaningful to improve their lives while "their qualifications would come in handy for cooperatives if they joined," said Shabani.
