Botswana Investment and Trade Centre (BITC) is preparing for the sixth International Conference on Africa’s Development (TICAD VI) to be held late August in Nairobi, Kenya, the agency’s chief executive confirmed on Friday.
In a brief interview with Botswana Guardian Online, Letsebe Sejoe said he had just had “lunch” with Japan’s Ambassador to Botswana, Masahiro Onishi and had used the opportunity to discuss bilateral issues with him. “The issue of TICAD also cropped up during our discussions,” he said.
Sejoe said the envoy’s attitude is that “Botswana is wonderful,” but sadly Japanese investors do not know much about her as an investment destination. Sejoe is now pulling all stops to participate in the summit in order to extract some investments for Botswana.
He said since TICAD is a big conference with participation of many big businesses and the world’s captains of industries, he was strategizing on how best to approach it. “I want to host the Japanese investors participating in the conference for breakfast before they go into conference,” to make the case for Botswana as an investment proposition.
In any case, as the country’s lead agent for inward and outward investment, Sejoe was still bound to return the recent visit by Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta to Botswana. The two countries agreed on a number of areas to explore further among them aviation; mining and infrastructure development.