The president promises pupils eggs and yoghurt, and his government has committed P654 million to robots and coding. Yet teachers say children lack textbooks, toilets and regular meals, and the ministry itself says it ran short of money last year for books, teachers’ salaries and school maintenance.
BONGANI MALUNGA
For more than a decade, a senior teacher in Kanye says, the textbooks have not come. So the teachers built their own supply line. They opened WhatsApp groups with their pupils’ parents and began sending out notes, study material and tests, most of it photocopied.
“There are no textbooks, it’s been over 10 years,” she said. The workaround carries its own danger. “If one of the study material items has mistakes,” she said, “then the whole district will be affected.” The gaps, she said, go deeper than buildings and books, to things as basic as toilets in schools and a feeding programme that runs irregularly. Yet government, she said, has spent heavily on the Emeritus STEAM programme.
On Tuesday, President Duma Boko spoke about school meals. “Teachers will tell you that kids get into class and fall asleep because they are hungry,” he told a workshop on children’s legislation in Tlokweng. “They must eat eggs and yoghurt and whatever else at school, it is their right. It is an obligation on the state.”
It was not the first time. Boko has made the call before, and in his State of the Nation Address last November he promised a home-grown school feeding programme.
A day earlier, the conditions the Kanye teacher describes reached Ntlo ya Dikgosi. Kgosi Matshidiso Babeile of Kisa raised the state of schools in Kgalagadi South, and the Assistant Minister of Child Welfare and Basic Education, Justin Hunyepa, conceded the point. “Under current conditions it would be difficult for students to perform to the optimum level,” he said.
The House’s chairperson, Kgosi Malope II, went further and questioned government’s priorities. He proposed that for one financial year, the millions earmarked for building new schools be diverted to repairing the ones that already exist. “Otherwise,” he said, “the same problems will persist.”
Two days, two admissions from the top of government that schools are failing the children in them. The president’s prescription was another day of pie in the sky. The money that might have met those needs has already been committed to something that is not an emergency: one of the government’s most consequential education reforms, set in motion with little public attention.
Days before the country’s 60th Independence celebrations, the Minister of Child Welfare and Basic Education, Nono Kgafela-Mokoka, inaugurated the five-year National STEAM Project before a subdued audience at Marulamantsi Primary School. Led by Emeritus Training Academy under a P654.4 million direct appointment, it promises coding and robotics kits, an e-learning platform and teacher training across all ten education regions. “We have overhauled the curriculum completely,” the minister said.
The contract was awarded without competition, on a scope the procurement regulator once found too thin to control costs, and its terms have never been made public. And it arrives in a primary school system whose own ministry says it is short of money for textbooks and teachers, and whose last curriculum reform, officials have said, failed for exactly those reasons.
For the Umbrella for Democratic Change, nearly two years into government, the question is whether, in reaching for the new, it is sowing the seeds of the old system’s collapse.
NOBODY TOLD THE TEACHERS
At a primary school whose location the Gazette is withholding, a teacher said nobody had explained the programme to him or his colleagues. “There is no official communication on STEAM and digital learning,” he said. “There is no formal information on how the new curriculum will be implemented or delivered. None of the teachers here has embarked on any training of the above changes.”
What his school does have is a shortage. “Currently we are running short of textbooks across all subjects,” he said. “Learners are sharing textbooks in the ratio of 1 book: 10 learners.” The books they have are “outdated textbooks that do not match curriculum.”
EMPTY PLATES
The president’s eggs and yoghurt would land in a feeding programme that councils are struggling to sustain. In Kanye, the chairperson of the district council told councillors in June that supplier delays were a continuing problem, with some schools receiving beans and samp only in part.
In the North West District, the council warned last year that inadequate funding had prompted a proposal to cut some of the food supplied to primary schools. It needed P70 million to feed learners at 39 primary schools, was spending more than P2 million a month and had only P6.5 million left, according to a Daily News report. Its chairperson acknowledged an “inconsistent supply of food items.” Among the proposed cuts, eggs would be served once a week instead of three times.
A SCOPE THAT GREW
School audits started on 9 September, according to Peter Nkaiseng, managing director of Emeritus in Botswana. Kits were to reach schools from 6 October, and teacher training was to begin on 19 October.
It was at Marulamantsi that the programme’s reach appeared to widen. Of the five deliverables Nkaiseng listed, the last was curriculum review. “We are in the process of reviewing the curriculum for standards one to seven,” he said. A team “under the banner of Logika” would do the work, he said, and “that process is now about to commence.”
The minister had declared the curriculum overhauled. Her contractor said the central work on the primary curriculum was only now about to commence.
The Kanye teacher knows what a curriculum without materials looks like in a classroom. “There comes a time when the syllabus refers teachers to pages in certain textbooks,” she said, “but there is no reference point because the textbooks are not available.”
The Gazette sent written questions to the ministry, its Department of Curriculum Development and Evaluation, Emeritus and the teacher unions, asking when curriculum review became part of the contract, who authorised it and who will approve it. None answered.
THE DEAL
In August 2025 the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority completed an investigation into the original P662.6 million procurement. The ministry had not justified bypassing competitive bidding, the regulator found, and “the convenience of the encounter of the benchmarking team with Emeritus” was no justification. The procurement was “unplanned, not budgeted for, and poorly conceptualized,” with a scope so thin it would “effectively allow the bidder to dictate the risk and cost profile of the project.” Emeritus had not proved its experience or substantiated its capacity. PPRA ordered the procurement cancelled.
A rival company, Tecboe, had already gone to court, and the High Court made parts of the regulator’s directive an order of court. In December the Court of Appeal overturned that order on procedural grounds, a technicality that left the regulator’s findings untouched.
Government went ahead. By July it had awarded Emeritus a revised five-year contract, again directly, worth P654,444,869.46. Kgafela-Mokoka told the Gazette at the time that “all legal disputes surrounding the procurement had been resolved” and that Emeritus was chosen “because of its expertise.”
The regulator sees it differently. In a letter to the Gazette on 5 October, PPRA said the matters “remain under consideration and have not been finally disposed of,” including Emeritus’s experience and capacity. Asked whether the programme’s scope had changed, it said it could not yet “express a concluded view.”
BEEN HERE BEFORE
Botswana has tried this before. Outcome-based education, introduced after a curriculum review around 2019, began in a handful of senior secondary schools in 2021. In January 2025, Professor Agreement Jotia, then a deputy permanent secretary in the ministry, called it “a curriculum revamp that was never resourced.” In Parliament in March this year, Kgafela-Mokoka said it had lacked resources and teacher training. Not one primary school teacher had been trained in it, she said, and only 1,185 of 3,232 senior secondary teachers had been.
Those conditions have not gone away. Presenting her budget the same month, the minister said her ministry had faced funding shortages in 2025/26 for textbooks and stationery, temporary teachers’ salaries, utilities and school maintenance. It now has “funds for five months to pay temporary teachers.”
In Kanye, the senior teacher sees the result every day. Many teachers left to further their studies, she said, and most were never replaced. “This resulted in a situation where most classes had 40 plus students under one teacher,” she said. “In most cases three students share a table suitable for only one student. Some even share chairs in the worst cases.”
At Marulamantsi, the minister named the danger herself. “Equipment alone does not transform education,” she said. “A robotics kit in a cupboard is not innovation.”
ON ITS KNEES
Publishers, whose business depends on government orders, have watched the shortage deepen. One, who asked not to be named, said book procurement had declined for a decade under the Botswana Democratic Party, and that they had hoped the new government would turn it around. Last year, the publisher said, government bought a small fraction of what schools need. This year, the publisher said, the deadlines for ordering primary school books have passed, and no new primary textbooks have been ordered.
The publisher described the system as “on its knees” and asked what would become of the children who start school next year. They questioned the wisdom of committing so much money to something new while the backlog grows.
The cost of such gaps is well documented. A World Bank evaluation in Ghana found that textbook provision accounted for about a quarter of the improvement in pupils’ test scores. Technology does little on its own: a review of 126 rigorous studies by J-PAL, a research centre at MIT, found that “supplying computers and internet alone generally do not improve students’ academic outcomes.” In Botswana, roughly one in four of the 52,766 pupils who sat the Primary School Leaving Examination in 2025 failed to reach a grade C, according to the Botswana Examinations Council.
A DROP IN THE OCEAN
Government has made overtures. The state-owned Education Infrastructure and Management Company has P1 billion this year for school repairs, and a P265 million programme is refurbishing 22 schools by March. An FNB Botswana Foundation partnership is putting P950,000 into doors and windows at 20 schools.
Against the need, it is a drop in the ocean. EIMC itself puts the cost of refurbishing the country’s 1,020 public schools at about P7 billion, and its first 22 schools are all secondary. None of these programmes buys a textbook. The P654.4 million committed to Emeritus is more than twice what EIMC is spending on those 22 schools.
The primary school teacher was blunt about where money is needed first. “Areas that need immediate government funding at the moment include school infrastructure, provision of teaching and learning resources and teacher training and professional development,” he said.
A FAMILIAR WARNING
Botswana has learned the cost of direct appointments before, and usually late. In 2021, the procurement board approved the direct engagement of Steve Harvey Global for television and radio production, a deal then reported at about P470 million. Only this August, long after the deal was struck, did Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee hear that it was worth more than P1 billion, with about P355 million paid in its first year. The Gazette alleges no wrongdoing by the company; the questions concern how government bought.
PPRA warned of the same danger with Emeritus: a bid whose gaps posed risks of “uncontrolled expenditure that has the potential to exceed the current bid price during implementation.”
THE SAME PROBLEMS
In January, a new cohort of children will begin Standard One. One publisher says no new books have been ordered for them. The president says they should eat eggs and yoghurt. In Kanye, the WhatsApp groups will be waiting.
In Ntlo ya Dikgosi on Monday, Kgosi Malope II warned what would happen if the basics were left unfixed. “The same problems,” he said, “will persist.”