For most Batswana, copyright is an abstraction – the fine print nobody reads, the warning that flickers before a film, the symbol stamped on the back of a textbook. Last month, in a modest magistrate’s court in Mogoditshane, that abstraction acquired a price tag: P38,276.64. On 21 September, Chief Magistrate Gofaone Morweng ruled that the Copyright Society of Botswana, known universally by its acronym COSBOTS, was entitled to judgment against Dawn Bell Academy, the fast-growing...

In the quiet arithmetic of a parliamentary answer lies one of Botswana’s most uncomfortable truths. Over the five years from 2021 to 2025, wild animals killed 48 people and injured 79 others across the country, the Ministry of Environment and Tourism told the Ntlo ya Dikgosi in June. Behind that single sentence sits a grim league table – and at the top of it, by a distance, stands the elephant. Of the 48 lives lost...

The office of 2026 is a place of two speeds. In one lane are the workers who open an artificial-intelligence tool the way an earlier generation opened a spreadsheet – daily, instinctively, without ceremony. They feel energised. They trust their bosses. They are, increasingly, asking for a raise. In the other lane, moving slower and with less certainty, sits the majority – the people who do most of the work but are being handed fewer...

At the launch of the WeekendPost’s Diamond Jubilee publication, Dr Gloria Somolekae argued that Botswana’s experts saw the warning signs decades ago – and that the task now is to act on them. Botswana’s extraordinary diamond fortune has long been held up as a model of how a resource can lift a nation. But at the launch of the WeekendPost’s Diamond Jubilee publication this week, one of the country’s most authoritative voices on development policy...

Most universities in Botswana are first generation, time to transform For nearly sixty years, the story of Botswana has been written in carbon. Diamonds built the roads, filled the classrooms, staffed the clinics and raised a young nation into one of Africa’s steadiest economies. But at the launch of WeekendPost’s Botswana Diamond Jubilee publication at Travel Lodge in Gaborone this week, the University of Botswana’s Vice Chancellor, Professor David Norris, argued that the country has...

For half a century, Botswana looked like Africa’s magnificent exception. It was the arid, thinly peopled country that stumbled onto extraordinary mineral riches and, against every cautionary tale about the resource curse, refused to squander them.