19 Mar 2025

By improving public safety, government would be empowering every citizen to pursue their dreams and contribute meaningfully to the nation’s sustainable development agenda.

President Advocate Duma Boko said this during official opening of the National Crime Prevention Conference in Gaborone yesterday. He said the conference themed: Forging Collaborative Pathways Towards Safer Communities, availed a perfect platform to examine pathways to assure the safety of the communities.

The President said it also allowed for the examination of unique and peculiar challenges faced by many communities and appreciated that such challenges required different types of interventions.

He said it was important for Botswana Police Service to re-commit to approaching its policing with the required agility, vitality and boldness in order to achieve effective service delivery, in terms of ensuring the security and welfare of Batswana.

“Our police now have to contend with trans-national crime and we have given them the responsibility to deal with this sophisticated type of crime,” said Advocate Boko.

He advised that the complexity of today’s criminal nature did not require a one size fit all approach, adding that the world was mugged by rapid technological advances and evolving social dynamics, that translated to varied and ever changing complex criminal challenges.

President Boko said crime transcended borders and had spilled out of traditional boundaries therefore, demanded urgent and innovative responses. He said there was need for inter-agency collaborations and coordination between all law enforcement agencies and the military.

“It is pleasing to note that the collaboration between the police service and the Botswana Defence Force during the rolling out of operation Pabalesego over the past festive season was fruitful as the personnel was visible and dealt with most of the intrusive violent crimes that were often faced,” he said.

President Boko also expressed concern over the increasing incidents of gender-based violence (GBV), saying it was a complex criminal act that needed to be rooted out. He said its complexity was on the grounds that it originated and resided in the most private individual spaces where Section 9 of the Constitution assured people of their privacy. The state, he said was precluded from invading unduly on the citizenry privacy, making it impossible for the law enforcement personnel to police the citizen’s private space.

“A lot of abuse happens behind closed doors where lives are lost and people are injured both physically and emotionally, and there is so much difficulty in policing individuals personal space and households,” he said.

This man-made tragedy of domestic violence, he said did not only violate the rights of the innocent but it also denied its victims and their families basic human rights and freedoms as enshrined in the Constitution of Botswana. He admitted the complexity in establishing a justifiable entry point in to individual private space to police, regulate and ensure people’s safety.

President Boko also acknowledged the role played by religious leaders, traditional elders and community counsellors in reducing GBV through mediation interventions between couples. Such leaders need to be capacitated enough to effectively carry out mediation roles that could play an important role in the reduction of GBV cases, President Boko said and condemned the increasing incidents of ritual killings saying the focal group in remedying the situation should be traditional healers. ENDS