18 Mar 2024

Oratile Ratau, 42, is the new Miss Millennium 2024. She won the coveted title after she was crowned in the wee hours on Sunday morning at the Millenium Jazz restaurant in Mogoditshane. 

Ratau, from Mochudi, becomes the 16^th beauty queen since the pageantry started in 2008. 

Dorcas Tshuma, 53, from Serowe is the first runner-up, while Polokego Mothobi, 44, from Mogoditshane, was crowned the second runner-up. 

In an interview immediately after she was crowned, Ratau said she had come up with a project dubbed ‘Itirele’ to roll out during her reign. She said the project was about empowering disadvantaged people in the community as well as out of school youth. 

She further explained that she had designed training programmes in areas such as financial empowerment and business start-ups to encourage the community to create employment for themselves. 

She said she was more than confident that the programme would work out since she tailor-made it to reflect her skills. 

Gaborone Mayor Austin Abram hailed the Miss Millenium pageant saying that it was one event that built confidence in women and lifted their self-esteem. 

Additionally, he said the pageant was about the wellbeing of women as well as recognising their place and the role they played in the society. 

Therefore, he thanked the event sponsors for contributing business packages for the pageants to start their own businesses. 

He further commended organisers and urged them to continue the good work they had been doing impacting lives positively. 

Before the new beauty queen was crowned, the chief judge, Mercy Thebe explained that they were looking for a well-rounded woman who inspired confidence to be crowned Ms Millennium. She said the women went through a rigorous judging process, which started off with a pre-judging session on Thursday where they had intimate discussions with them. 

The pageants were also judged on their talents based on their roles as women in the evening as well as how they faired during their evening wear. 

This year, the BotswanaPost partnered with the Miss Millennium to create “Bo-Mma Poso” through their new service dubbed, DigiPost. 

The BotswanaPost Chief of Corporate Affairs and Sustainability, Tebogo Lebotse-Sebego explained that as a partner, the BotswanaPost’s collaboration with Miss Millennium 2024 was a way of economic empowerment through its service offering of DigiPost. 

DigiPost is a smart App-based extension of BotswanaPost sales touch point that allowed for the onboarding of independent individuals and SMMEs to resell postal services. 

In this way, every licensed hawker or street vendor could be an agent of the post offering services such as Poso money and many other products. 

As a woman centric initiative, the beauty pageant recognised the contribution women played in nation building in various forms. Therefore Lebotse-Sebego said it was perfectly aligned to the audiences of the Miss Millennium. 

For that she thanked the women who participated for raising their hand. The Ms Millennium pageantry aims at empowering women over 40 years as well as focus on the development of the boy and girl-child through various development projects in communities. 

The reigning queen is expected to choose a project that can impact the community that she chooses to work with. Ends