Kabo Ngwanaamotho

Someone once posed this question to me; “When will Botswana realise that this wealth is theirs and start enjoying it rather than getting other countries to indulge themselves and leave Botswana still poor”

But then again, like ive said before, im not really that good with politics, so some of these issues i find really difficult to understand. Recently there has been proposals for and Independent Power Producer to mine and use Botswana’s abundant coal to produce power that the entire south region needs badly – Now, this has been taken up by a company called CIC Energy and from what i hear after some very long negotiations Botswana managed to negotiate a 25% take off from the power plant that is going to be built, the remaining 75% of course will be for South Africa, i am naiive, so please be patient with me; maybe our current energy demand does not call for any more than the agreed 25%, but are we well covered for the mining boom that seems prominent as the recession curtain is slowly uplifted – if you are going to say yes i can confidently tell you NO, you are lying, i doubt it!

Now why the doubt? – take our biggest income generator for example, diamonds (70% of our export earnings, 30% of GDP, 50% of gorvenment revenue), mmmh, now thats big! And what do we do to show that we have put all our eggs in one basket and that we are confident aint nobody going to break them – we entrust the basket to a family residing in South Africa – again, im a politics rookie, so bear with me. But yeah, our diamonds are mined by a company that is owned by a family in RSA – from what i have heard this is so because they have the expertise that we neen, huh? expertise!!! you want to tell me since 1967 up to now we have gained no expertise as a country at all that we still cant take the matter into our own hands and start enjoying our own profits?

Maybe ke bua thata, hope i dont get into trouble…