At the Labour Day celebrations in Sua on Tuesday, Midzi urged governments to form national investment trusts where a pool of resources are mobilised for workers to borrow and buy shares or equity. He appealed for the creation of a nationally and regionally focused mining industry. In such an industry workers in each country must play an integral part in nation building and public policy formation and implementation. "In this regard, the workers in the mining industry of this region will automatically kill off privatisation in their respective countries," he said. Speaking at the celebrations, Botswana Congress Party (BCP) president Gilson Saleshando said economies perform poorly because of badly designed projects, weak feasibility studies and wrongly located projects caused by politics of patronage. He urged the government to rethink its development options to avoid privatisation. "As long as there are no better linkages in the domestic economy and diversification of the economy is not achieved, privatisation is just out of the question. If the government has no capacity to rethink its development options, the only remaining way out is political change," he said.
Saleshando added that it is through the efforts of the state and workers that a public enterprise is established and operated which creates a special relationship between the partners. He told workers to be courageous and stand up to participate in the consumption of the wealth they create. He accused workers of failing to demonstrate that they know where they are going.
