Botswana: The Commissioner of Prisons – Commissioner Dinah Marathe and her Staff in Gaborone paused and connected with the President of the Republic of Botswana, Dr Mokgweetsi Eric Keabetswe Masisi, the people of Zutshwa and the rest of the country to witness the live broadcast of the Mindset Change Campaign launch.
Leveraging on the motto of ‘Building a High-Performance Culture, Botswana Prison Service has shifted its focus to aligning its business processes to the Government Priority Areas (The Reset Agenda).
The Service has therefore prioritised Mindset Change as one of the critical components in its transformational journey to being a model of correctional excellence. Through the Commissioner’s Roadmap, Priority number 5 (Mindset Change) is embedded in all the Service’s functional areas so that both the Officers and Prisoners are seamlessly taken on board.
This is evidenced by the commitment to increasing efforts and interventions to achieve more with less while engaging all stakeholders towards safe custodial care, rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders as the mandate suggests.
BDC hosted the Mindset Change Campaign launch screening at Fairscape Precinct to ensure that its stakeholders also partake in the important discussions that were led by the President of Botswana, Dr Mokgweetsi Eric Keabetswe Masisi, during the launch of the Mindset Change Campaign that took place in Zutshwa.
In his Reset and Reclaim Agenda Speech of the 8th of May 2021, His Excellency the President Dr Mokgweetsi E.K. Masisi charged that: “Mindset change: it is extremely important that we change our mindset if our goal to attain high income country status is to be achieved”.
Therefore, as part of the Five National Priorities, the Mindset Change was identified as critical to the attainment of the above. As a direct result, the Mindset Change Campaign mirrors that ideology of transforming Botswana from an upper middle-income country to a high-income country, with prosperous inhabitants, through a change of mindsets. This is a campaign that is expected to run for three years.
We also ran interviews with the audience in order to get more views on what mindset change means to them as individuals and as a collective.
The BDC audience park hosted all BDC employees, Farscape Precinct tenants and the public.