When Advocate Duma Gideon Boko rises in Parliament at 1400 hours on Monday, 9 November 2026, to deliver his third State of the Nation Address since the Umbrella for Democratic Change ended the Botswana Democratic Party’s fifty-eight-year grip on power, he will be speaking into a room that has grown noticeably less forgiving. A year ago the mood was expectant, almost indulgent. This year the ledger has been opened, and the country is reading it...

The argument Botswana Railways carried into the Sandton Convention Centre last month was, at its heart, a plea to redraw the map in the mind. For a country whose economy has long been described by what it lacks – a coastline, a port of its own, a direct lane to the sea – the pitch delivered at the Southern African Railway Association (SARA) Conference was an insistence that geography is a matter of interpretation. Landlocked,...

Botswana has built the roads. Now it must teach its young people to drive. That, in essence, is the verdict of a landmark new study that places the country 45th out of 56 Commonwealth nations for youth artificial-intelligence readiness – a middling ranking that conceals a striking contradiction at the heart of the nation’s digital ambitions. The Ayre Index, launched on Tuesday at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda, scores Botswana...

The contraband arrived the way it so often does: tucked into truck cabs, passed across border counters, laid out on the tables of street vendors who promised relief in a bottle. By the time the Botswana Medicines Regulatory Authority had finished counting, the haul told its own quiet story of a trade that thrives in the gaps – 2.8 tonnes of illegal and unauthorised medicinal products, worth more than P500,000, gathered up and condemned to...

Donald Trump trained the full weight of the state on Ilhan Omar – the raids, the subpoenas, the threat of exile. Minneapolis answered with a landslide. For much of the past year, Ilhan Omar lived under a kind of siege few American politicians have ever been asked to endure. The president of the United States did not merely oppose her at the ballot box; he set out, by his own telling, to erase her from...

Bank of Botswana chose steadiness over surprise on Wednesday, leaving its main interest rate untouched for another cycle even as inflation retreated from the uncomfortable heights it reached in late summer. The decision, delivered after a meeting of the Bank of Botswana’s Monetary Policy Committee, keeps the Monetary Policy Rate anchored at 5.5 percent and signals that policymakers are prepared to wait out a stubborn price surge rather than choke off a fragile recovery. The...

In a government that has long prized consensus over speed, caution over conviction, Omphile John Sehurutshe arrived with a different instrument in his pocket: a stopwatch. As Deputy Permanent Secretary to the President responsible for High Priority Projects, he occupies one of the most consequential and least comfortable chairs in the Office of the President – a role invented, in effect, to make Botswana move faster than Botswana is accustomed to moving.

In roughly twenty minutes, state-backed hackers drained the world’s largest crypto exchange, eclipsing the Bybit theft and setting a grim new record for digital crime. The money was gone before most of the world had finished dinner. Beginning at 20:05 Universal Time on Thursday, October 29, an attacker reached into the digital wallets of Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange on earth, and in about twenty minutes siphoned off roughly $6.36 billion across ten separate blockchains....