Long before John Thiite, the former Member of Parliament, and the businessman Nicholas Zakheem were summoned to answer corruption charges at the Broadhurst Magistrates’ Court, the State had already tested – and lost – a central thread of its case in a quieter courtroom hundreds of kilometres away. The reckoning came not with the clang of handcuffs but in a measured judgment handed down in March 2026, when the Francistown High Court dismissed the government’s...

In the ledgers of Botswana’s financial underworld, the crime of the moment is deceptively mundane: taking other people’s money and promising to make it grow. It rarely does.

More than a quarter of a trillion pula flowed into Botswana last year, a torrent of mining receipts, family remittances and foreign investment that moved through the country’s banks, border posts and, increasingly, the ledgers of digital-currency firms.

A long-running battle over who holds the legal authority to prosecute one of Botswana’s most closely watched financial crime cases has moved to a higher stage, as businessman Bakang Seretse presses the High Court to remove a senior anti-corruption official from the matter altogether. Having failed in his first attempt before a lower court, Seretse has filed a notice of appeal challenging the ruling handed down by Broadhurst Regional Magistrate Mareledi Dipate on 30 June...

Nearly nine years after the death of nine-year-old Metlha Sibanda, former Civil Aviation Authority of Botswana aircraft marshal Motlatsi Khoto is set to challenge his murder conviction and death sentence before the Court of Appeal on October 2, 2026. Khoto was convicted and sentenced to death by the Francistown High Court in connection with Metlha’s death. The case began in January 2018, when the child, who was the daughter of Khoto’s former girlfriend, Unami Sibanda,...

The charge sheet reads like a blueprint for looting a development agency – three loan applications, four shell-like companies, roughly 5.13 million pula, and a trail of money that, prosecutors say, never went where it was supposed to go.

The High Court of Botswana has brought a close to the protracted legal battle between Choppies co-owners Ottapathu Ramachandran, Ismail Farouk, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (Botswana), along with former lead auditor Binedel Rudi.  On September 1, 2026, Justice Tapiwa Kganyago formalized a draft consent order that ended the proceedings. The order confirms that Ramachandran and Farouk have withdrawn their claims against PwC and Rudi, effectively concluding the case. Regarding legal costs, the parties agreed to generally bear...

Botswana’s cattle population has taken a notable hit over the past decade, shrinking by 6.1 percent according to the latest Agricultural Census released for 2025. The count stood at 1,638,543 cattle, down from 1,744,166 in 2015.

They have shared a roof, a life, a future – but not a signature on a registry. And in the eyes of Botswana’s newest employment law, that omission could cost them dearly when a family crisis hits.

QUOTE – Two narratives – one of diplomatic grace, the other of judicial exoneration – collide over a Botswana woman’s release from a Bangladeshi death cell. The truth matters more than either side seems willing to admit. By the time Lesedi Molapisi walked out of a Bangladeshi prison after more than four years on death row, the story of how she got there had already been told a dozen different ways.