Africa-Press – Botswana. The sluggish pace at which land boards across the country allocate land of various uses to applicants can be a deterrent to efforts that seek to improve people’s lives.
Addressing a kgotla meeting in Hebron on Thursday, Acting Minister of Lands and Agriculture, Dr Edwin Dikoloti said the status quo prevented many Batswana from accessing socio-economic programmes for which access to land was a prerequisite.
This cannot be business as usual, it is time that we deliberated on this issue, Dr Dikoloti said, noting that the slow pace of allocations had for a long time proven to be a thorny issue that repeatedly impeded progress.
Thus, he said it was important that the entire land management system be looked into with the objective of addressing the bottlenecks that existed within it. In another subject, Dr Dikoloti called for a multi-pronged approach to stock theft, a problem that he said was prevalent in the Barolong area.
He lamented how stock theft continued to thwart residents’ efforts to break free from poverty.
In Ramatlabama where he addressed another kgotla meeting, he said livestock rustling was also threatening efforts aimed at reviving the area’s agricultural output.
Still in relation to agriculture, the acting minister, who is also Good Hope/Mmathethe constituency Member of Parliament, encouraged residents to consider pursuing agri-preneurship, saying it was one way through which they could ensure that their region recovered its lost glory of being one of Botswana’s bread baskets.
Dr Minah Mosele of National Agricultural Research and Development Institute (NARDI) reiterated the call for residents to adopt and pursue agri-preneurship in order to draw the most out of agriculture.
She said value addition in agriculture had several benefits as it could enhance nutritional content, improve taste and prolong the shelf life of produce.
Dr Mosele urged residents to approach NARDI for guidance and support regarding how they could exploit the agri-preneurship space.
For their part, residents of the two villages raised several issues for which they sought government’s intervention.
In Hebron, one Mr Justice Motaung called on government to ensure that only seeds of certified quality be distributed to farmers, alleging that his entire maize crop had failed due to having been issued seeds of questionable quality.
In Ramatlabama, a resident, Mr Patrick Oremeng requested for an extension of operating hours for Ramatlabama border post.
Mr Oremeng said the move would result in an increase in the revenue that the border post earned for the country.
Village Development Committee (VDC) chairperson, Ms Karabo Tlhapi said the poor state of cleanliness at the border post was worrying.
She said the situation was worsened by the lack of ablution facilities for use by travelers especially truckers who often queued overnight waiting for the border post to open so that they could cross and proceed with their journey.
Ms Tlhapi appealed for ablution facilities to be built and then handed over to the VDC to operate them as a revenue generating platform for the village. She also complained about their local clinic, saying the facility was too small to handle the swelling numbers of patients.
Source: dailynews
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