By the time you read this article Botswana would have turned fifty years as an independent country.
This is not an easy feat.
It is a huge milestone worth celebrating.
And as has been happening over the last months, self-congratulations and breast-beating will go on for a few more months.
By the time you read this article Botswana would have turned fifty years as an independent country.
This is not an easy feat.
It is a huge milestone worth celebrating.
And as has been happening over the last months, self-congratulations and breast-beating will go on for a few more months.
It’s time to admit that under the current structural makeup, our district councils, which are arguably the most important administrative units for our country have not worked as efficiently as we had liked them to.
Their biggest shortcoming is that they have let down the very people who need government services most.
The Botswana Democratic Party’s (BDP) magnificent history and the reputation of its self-taught political philosophers has carried it across battle lines at polls that have become synonymous with Botswana’s democratic credentials. Throughout the BDP’s rule or misrule, Botswana has transformed from an empty desert land to an upper-middle income country.
Not for the first time, the issue of just how opposition parties in Botswana can position themselves to become a viable alternative is heavily permeating our national political discourse.
At the centre of it all is the ongoing courtship between Umbrella for Democratic Change and the Botswana Congress Party.
Since my high school days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the subsequent years at university there, I have never witnessed a greater spectacle than the process of electing a president of the United States.
The confusing electoral progression is most entertaining.
I have a good mind there couldn’t be a better timing for reckoning than now, as this year stands as a signpost for us to check where we are as a country with reference to where we come from and where we desire to go.
I am beginning to doubt my sanity. I need an appointment with psychiatrists. I also deserve a sit down with counsellors. The way I get easily depressed at things that people have no problems with call for psychiatric evaluation. I mean, why is it that I seem to get worried about things that many Batswana seem happy about.
There is a perfectly good reason why BOTS50 rolls off your tongue with such ease compared to BOT50. You may have also heard people say “I come from Bots” and never: “I come from Bot”. This is not by mistake. There is a reason to the propensity to call Botswana Bots and not Bot. This technically is known as hypocorisms – pet name of calling.
The level of debt among Batswana is now fast approaching a crescendo.
Botswana’s economy has been in a mess since before the global economic down turn that officially started in 2008.
