Africa-Press – Botswana. The Minister for International Relations, Dr Phenyo Butale says allegations that President Advocate Duma Boko’s international trips are frequent and have a bearing on the already cash-strapped national coffers are untruthful.
Dr Butale said in an interview on the sidelines of the 38th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Saturday that such inferences were uninformed and misleading.
‘’We are the ones that have made the pronouncement following October 2024 general elections that the nation was cash-strapped and for someone to purport the President and the government he leads are reckless in their spending is worrisome,” he said.
The unfortunate undertones according to Dr Butale were mere political scores meant to discredit and soil the good intentions of the Umbrella for Democratic Change to change the livelihoods of Batswana.
According to Dr Butale the few meetings that President Boko attended since his ascent to the high office included amongst others, the two-day visit to the FACETS conference in Antwerp, Belgium last November where President Boko gave a keynote address.
This, he said happened at a critical time when the diamonds that continue to be the lifeblood of Botswana were stock-piled due to a slump in the diamond market; something he relayed changed immediately after the Antwerp visit as the first batch of diamonds were sold.
Moreover, he said at this conference, President Boko not only met with key players in the upstream and downstream of the diamond industry but also got a chance to reassure De Beers of the government of Botswana’s commitment to the partnership that dated back many years.
At the same meeting, Dr Butale said President Boko had an opportunity to engage with De Beers’ top brass and cajoled them to consider restarting negotiations that had stalled for some time.
To date and in just under 100 days of rule Botswana and De Beers managed to complete and seal a new deal that would handsomely contribute to the economic landscape of the Southern African nation, thanks to the travel by President Boko, he said.
Also, Dr Butale said Botswana as a signatory of numerous organisations and ardent believers in multilateralism must meet with like-minded partners and countries alike, to seek lasting solutions to a plethora of challenges that also affect it.
President Boko’s few meetings, he said were in the context of finding ways to resuscitate the near comatose economy through a network of partners.
Besides the FACETS meeting, Minister Butale said President Boko had attended the extraordinary summits in Zimbabwe meant to devise ways to bring peace to the troubled Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and was now attending AU summit.
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