I don’t believe in employment creation. I know that employment creation catches up with you as the time goes on.
I believe in empowering the indigenous citizens to be able to be innovative on their environment. I want Batswana who are well prepared to compete on the global village with their own products. I believe in making people create wealth with their traditional means of production.
In my vision I see a Botswana of equally different tribes who took advantage of its cultural diversity to be the African food and minerals processing center. I see Botswana as the best tourism resort in the whole world. But this can only happen when we have a paradigm shift in our system as follows.
1) Education system to include and incorporate indigenous knowledge.
2) Education system to be inclusive in developing local languages and promoting local cultures.
3) Education system to develop traditional products and traditional means of production of different tribes of Botswana to make them compete in the global village.
4) Education system to empower young people to be researchers of their environment and come up with solutions based on problems faced by the people as per their lifestyle and beliefs.
5) Education system to focus on producing graduates who can manufacture, produce, or process something out of the abundant natural resources we have in Botswana.
6) The improved labour laws that hinder opportunists and unethical capitalist to exploit the indigenous citizens.
7) Flexible land acts and policies which give indigenous people advantage and opportunities to utilize the land anytime they want for anything they think. (I will talk about land in land management) No land rights for foreigners or foreign companies.
8) Building strong cooperative societies to help farmers and other people who are in small production of traditional products to have their products reach the market. (We should not be importing fish, beef, milk, eggs, maize in any form, game meat and many things that are thrown away in the other parts of the country).
9) Reserving Tourism, Agriculture, and Cultural heritage business to the indigenous citizens.
10) Set up an industrialization program which includes the importing of expects knowledge to impart it to local people. The industrialization should not focus on only job creation but the following (market creation, employment, value gain in our raw materials, entrepreneur development and on job training of future expects.
When Batswana are not working and hire foreigners to work in their business, firms and farms I can’t complain. But I believe this song of employment creation has misinterpreted by our government that they now bring foreigners here to exploit Batswana by paying them peanuts and getting their agriculture products for next to nothing.
Let’s aim to hire than being employed
*Kekwaletswe Mokwadi
EMPOWER THE PEOPLE
