BRILLIANT POLITICS
President Duma Gideon Boko will next week Tuesday perform the ground-breaking for the Bonno National Housing Programme in Palapye.
Bonno is the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC)’s signature promise to build 61,000 houses across 61 constituencies, delivering 1,000 houses per constituency.
On the surface, the plan sounds bold and clever, and on paper, it is.
By spreading houses evenly across every constituency, the government can claim progress everywhere at once, even in areas where plots have been impossible to allocate for decades.
But for the thousands of Batswana squeezed into backrooms, rented flats and backyard shacks in the Greater Gaborone area, the numbers hide an uncomfortable truth: 1,000 houses per constituency does not match the population density of urban centres.
In Gaborone and the villages of Mogoditshane, Tlokweng, Mmopane and Metsimotlhabe, people have waited for plots for 20, 30, even 40 years.
It is no secret why; the city is where jobs are, schools are better, and hospitals. Roads, water, and electricity are also more reliable.
Rural plots may exist on paper, but families who have built their lives in the capital do not want to uproot to settlements where there are few basic services.
Yet under the Bonno plan, Gaborone, Mogoditshane, and Tlokweng will get the same 1,000-house allocation as sparsely populated constituencies in the desert or the north - a smart equal share but a crude mismatch for reality. Land has always been the biggest excuse for inaction. Yet, when speaking to The Midweek Sun this week, Mogoditshane/Thamaga District Council Secretary General Jimmy
Mckenzie said they have already identified land which will be given to people under the Bonno programme.
He explained that this will be possible because each constituency will build 1 000 houses and they will be looking for land in all those villages.
His explanation shows the logic: if Gabane, for instance, which has a population of more than 20,000 people, cannot find land for 1,000 houses, planners can stretch the same target across satellite villages where land is available.
If one constituency has five villages, they can split the 1,000 into 200 houses per village. That is clever maths, but the urban masses stay crowded while empty homes risk standing unused in far-off lands.
Ahead of the launch next week, McKenzie said, “Time is not on our side, we are still waiting to know who the contractor is. But we believe that by the end of the week, we will have everything ready.
We are working day and night with BHC to ensure each constituency starts work, even if it means using Turnkey or SHHA programmes to find beneficiaries.”
President Boko and Finance Minister Ndaba Gaolathe have both framed the programme as reimagining housing as a right.
In his State of the Nation Address, Boko declared, “Housing must be accessible to every Motswana. We will map needs, identify sites, and commence pilot projects that bring dignity back to our people.”
Minister Onneetse Ramogapi has promised that 30,000 jobs will come from the construction boom and P3 billion will flow through the economy, a win for local contractors and councils.
But the human side remains tricky. The truth is that urban Botswana is changing fast. The promise of a free plot on the outskirts no longer works for the young professional renting in Gaborone Block 8 or the family doubling up in Old Naledi. They want land and houses where their lives already are.
Meanwhile, the waiting lists for Gaborone’s residential plots remain frozen in time, application files growing dusty in land board offices while the Bonno programme breaks ground on faraway sites that few urban families want to move to.
The UDC’s 61,000-house target is brilliant politics; it shows visible action quickly in all corners of the country, avoiding the embarrassment of slow urban allocation battles. But whether it genuinely tackles Botswana’s urban housing crisis is another question entirely.
Come July 8th, the big machines will roar to life in Palapye; however, the real test is whether, five years from now, those new houses will stand occupied by people who truly needed them or remain empty, while the city’s backyard rental queues grow longer.