Batswana must stop sabotaging one another!

Some poignant observations about the state of this country with respect to transitioning to a knowledge economy through digitisation are captured in the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Report for 2021.

To put it bluntly, we are among the worst-performing in the 64 countries that were sampled and assessed in terms of their capacity and ability to adapt and explore digital technologies that can lead to transformation in business models, government practices, and society in general.

Overall, we are ranked 63rd out of 64 with a digital competitiveness index score of 33.004 out of 100. Now, this should really be a cause for concern given the government’s much-hyped Reset Agenda, which hopes to improve and accelerate the digital transition.

In a story carried in our sister publication last week, we learned that the rankings and scores of the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Report were conducted for three key factors - Knowledge, Technology, and Future-Readiness.

Knowledge speaks to intangible infrastructure, which underlines the process of digital transformation through the discovery, understanding, and learning of new technologies.

Technology considers the overall context in which the development of digital technologies is enabled and lastly, Future-Readiness assesses the degree of technology adoption by government, business, and society in general.

Under the various factors, Botswana ranked; 64th with a score of 32.58 out of 100 for Knowledge, 63rd for Technology factor with a score of 23.35 out of 100, and 63rd in the Future-Readiness factor with a score of 16.18 out of 100.

In a nutshell, the report makes a mockery of our ambitions in that it suggests that we lack the talent, training, and education, and scientific concentration to compete in a digitalised world.

It says that our key strengths under the knowledge factor include a sound total public expenditure on education (1st), a sizeable number of graduates in science (36th), and the availability of foreign highly skilled personnel (36th).

This notwithstanding, we ranked poorly on the availability of hi-tech patent grants (64th), employee training (63rd), digital/technological skills (63rd), and lack of international experience (61st).

The Technology factor assesses key elements surrounding regulatory framework, capital, and the technological framework. It finds that our key strengths in this factor include sound credit rating (39th), investment in telecommunication (41st), and availability of scientific research legislation (49th).

But these are dampened by our poor faring in the development and application of technology (64th), funding for technological development (63rd), internet bandwidth speed (63rd), and percentage of high-technology exports (63rd).

We are told that in order to overcome this digital divide, Botswana is investing P3.1 billion through the Economic Transformation Recovery Plan (ETRP) to address digital infrastructure gaps (SMART-Bots), automating land registration, expanding the biometric identification, effective rollout of e-government services, and promoting digital payment infrastructure. As for the FutureReadiness factor, which talks to adaptive attitudes, business agility, and business integration, we performed extremely poorly with the only positive aspect being the low level of Entrepreneurial Fear of Failure (2nd).

The report says we are challenged in the use of big data and analytics (64th), low level of Public-Private Partnerships (62nd), low agility of companies (62nd), low levels of e-Government (60th), and low knowledge transfers (60th). Now, I took this deliberate measure to quote generously from the report so that we can all be clear about what ranking institutions think about our efforts to break even in the digital space. There is no rocket science to these findings, we are very poor in digital literacy and the sooner we come to terms with this realisation, the better for us all, because only then can we take the proper remedial actions. But, I must point out that there are many geniuses out there that the system is actively suppressing to ensure that their inventions and innovations don’t come out in the open.

I have recently been blessed to discover firsthand, how our bureaucratic red tape system stifles the minds of these geniuses and how the state financial institutions and especially the officers that work there, will frustrate at all costs, these geniuses little realising that by blocking them, they are basically blocking the progress of the country. In three distinct cases I have seen inventors in the Artificial Intelligence space; Indigenous Medicinal and Food technologies as well as young men who have come up with digital currency solutions as well as other digital trading platforms being frustrated and blocked by this system!

We cannot hope to break even in the world of technology if our institutions are manned by men and women who lack the basic common sense to distill right from wrong. These officers are mainly interested in what benefits will accrue to them personally if they help a client, with little to no regard for public service. If I may speak directly to the leadership of this country, let me now and here ask them to seriously consider financing innovations that show potential to take this county forward.

For example, the commercial value proposition of the HEVEFRU product needs to be actively explored; the same goes for the development of a neurotransistor by a Motswana, who has been let down by the system and has finally decided to upload his book on Amazon; and there is also the young man who now has to battle Bank of Botswana and the government machinery for merely having the audacity and desire to construct the first nanotechnology manufacturing plant in Botswana at a cost of US$30 million, which would be raised through EnergyGlass Africa’s Global Citizen Investment Scheme (GCIS), which uses crowd-funding to raise capital for projects.

If your system is designed to block its citizens from releasing their innovative and creative potentials, then you are doomed to stay at the bottom of the real players, this is the reality that Botswana has to contend with.