Africa-Press – Botswana. Minister of Defence and Security, Mr Kagiso Mmusi on Thursday handed over farm machinery and implements worth over P2.7 million to Botswana Prison Service.
Such included five tractors, two mechanical four row planters, two disc harrows, two rippers, one 28-disc hydraulic offset, two 2 000-litre trailed boom sprayers, two fertilizer spreaders and two lift cranes.
“By giving these state of the art machinery and implements, we want to ensure that the Prison Service has the necessary resources to till the soil and produce food,” he said during a handover ceremony, adding that acquisition of the machinery and implements was fundamental to improving the Prison Service’s operational efficiency in agriculture.
Mr Mmusi said the machinery would ease the burden of labour intensive methods of production and harness appropriate technologies for improved agricultural productivity and further said their procurement showed commitment by government to resource organs of government for improved service delivery.
The minister also said Botswana Prison Service in its mission to intensify offender rehabilitation through agriculture, developed a food security strategy in 2019.
The strategy aimed to improve the physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food by all offenders to meet their dietary needs for an active and healthy lifestyle while also giving them theoretical and practical learning experiences, he said.
Mr Mmusi said the strategy in the fiscal year 2021/22 had given birth to several sub-projects ranging from water resource development, protected farming, irrigation farming, and refurbishment of farming infrastructure as well as expansion of farmland, expansion of livestock and dairy farming initiatives including procurement of farm machinery and implements.
Commissioner of Prisons, Ms Dinah Marathe said the organisation existed to provide safe and secure custody to offenders, through effective rehabilitation and reintegration programmes adding that safe keeping of prisoners would not be meaningful if not matched with the relevant needs-based programmes, which ensured character reformation of prisoners.
She said they had a wide array of rehabilitation programmes that target correction of behaviour as well as skills acquisition for sustenance upon release from prison, adding that prison agriculture was one of those, hence said receiving the machinery and implements would go a long way in ensuring efficiency and helping them to meet their desire to feed the prison community and eventually the nation as per the prison food Security Strategy aspirations.
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