Action for jobs, a case for private sector participation
Correspondent | Friday January 29, 2021 16:52
What is in it for me? That is the one most fundamental question that every Man holds dear. Every Man is motivated by profit. With this truth staring at us, we knew we had to have an answer should our potential sponsors happen to ask.
And they did. By the time we got to the fifth or sixth potential sponsor, we knew the drill and that led us to upgrade our pitch. We had to. We are asking for 30 million Pula in funding after-all. That is colossal! And others have sweat more for less.
Our prospects pummeled us with questions. The first week was tougher than any other that followed. We had just returned from a tour of the country, 13 stopovers, all district headquarters and had just told these stopovers that we were on a mission to raise capital to support the employment of creative youth in Botswana. One of our earliest prospects locked us in for 75 minutes, shredding us to pieces, dressing us down with questions.
He did such a great job of poking holes into our pitch-deck that we paused sending pitches as we had promised the first three or four prospects we had talked to prior to this one. Eventually we had a pitch we believed was worth the attention of the private sector. We have not forgotten the good intention of fellow business leaders; who in search for clarity, inadvertently drove us to refine our pitch. The gesture was as humbling as our experience around the country.
None of us on tour could have ever prepared enough for the challenges we faced. In every place the demography was different which means we had to repackage our messaging every morning. And we did not have enough time to prepare because we would always find out the complexion of the demography the moment we stood to address attendees. Add the pressure of the two-hour limit imposed by the COVID-19 Presidential Task Team while orchestrating four different teams; two at base, one on the ground and one on the road, and it sounds like chaos. But it was the reception that made the burden lighter. We were received well at every stop with every next stop being better than the last. Our most humble experience was in Ramotswa where we had Kgosi Mosadi Seboko actually leading the largest crowd of youth in our tour.
The mood was electrifying and as we listened to her speaking about the opportunities in Ramotswa and Mogobane that could uplift the youth, we could not help but want to win. We had to. Here they were the youth of the nation, the prime and pride of any nation; on a weekday, attending in droves, a public presentation about employment creation. We had to win!
And that is where we point to every time we answer the “what is in it for me‘ question.
What the private sector gets to do is invest in a future market that will grow their topline in the long term. Of course if strategic plans are only three years long, this might be a challenge. But strategic terms can be extended with mid-term reviews locked into them.
A P30 million investment into something like this will not cost the same in 15 to 20 years. The price will be way too high that one has to wonder if the proposal will be possible. And if at that point we cannot afford to pay the price, what would the state of our marketplace be like? In 2007 it was cheaper to build a desalination plant in Namibia and draw water from the sea.
Not because our dams will be empty one day but because they are not making any new rivers at the same rate as the growth of the population. Now when we have dammed every possible river and aquifer, we would look to the sea and the cost of a desalination plant will not be the same as it was in 2007. That is what is in it for the private sector in Botswana.
A market that will be gainfully employed for it to be able to drive the consumption of the time. Perhaps at the time, riding on the investment made today, a plan to put a Motswana on a planet somewhere will be raising P30 billion in sponsorship funding for the development of blueprints.
GABRIEL RASENGWATSHE*
*Gabriel Rasengwatshe is Gabz FM Station Manager and Action for Jobs lead strategist. Writes here in his personal capacity