John Thite spent years believing a certain chapter of his life was closed. The case, as he tells it, was fought, won, and buried. Then the summons arrived.

A rebellion is simmering inside the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), where a bloc of regional chairpersons has begun pressing the party’s embattled president, Mpho Balopi, to relinquish the helm while he answers to a battery of criminal charges.

It began, as these things often do, with a sealed door and a letter marked confidential. What has unfurled since is a tangled contest in which the machinery of Botswana’s state – its spies, its tax collectors and its police – stands accused of being pressed into service in a bruising commercial quarrel over tobacco. At the heart of the affair is a single document, a letter dated 7 July 2026 and bearing the signature...

For nearly sixty years, Botswana’s land boards have been the quiet arbiters of one of the nation’s most intimate assets – the ground beneath its people’s feet. Now that machinery of tribal land administration faces an uncertain reckoning, as the governing Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) weighs a sweeping redesign of how the country parcels out, oversees and safeguards its communal land. At the heart of the deliberations, according to reports reaching this publication, is...

Accused of defrauding Gov’t by winning Tutume tender on false terms They are also accused of inflating Interim Payment Certificate They purported to have done work for China State Construction & Engineering Corporation  Inside the sprawling fraud indictment that prosecutors say turned a village infrastructure project into a conduit for forged letters, inflated invoices and quietly moved millions. It began, prosecutors say, with a lie dressed in the language of credibility: references that gleamed with...

They move quietly, these grey-haired custodians of the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), working the phones and the private rooms rather than the podiums. A cadre of veteran B.D.P. elders has launched a discreet, behind-the-scenes campaign to keep a simmering leadership crisis from tearing the party apart – and, at the heart of their effort, to keep one embattled man in his chair. The elders have thrown their weight behind the party president, Mpho Balopi, urging...

It began, as many crises do, with something mundane: a government computer system that had simply grown tired. For years, the platform that sits at the beating heart of the state’s finances – the Government Accounting and Budgeting System, known across the civil service simply as GABS – had processed the nation’s payments, tracked the expenditure of every ministry vote, and quietly kept the machinery of government solvent. It is a subsidiary of the larger...

As the opposition Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) confronts a court case against its president, the real trial may be the one happening behind closed doors. Kentse Rammidi picked his words with the careful precision of a man who knows that one wrong syllable could ignite a political firestorm. “There was no conflict of interest at all,” the BDP secretary general said flatly, as though the very suggestion was an affront to the party’s institutional integrity....

Karabo Gare, the chairman of Botswana’s beleaguered opposition Democratic Party, broke a days-long silence on Tuesday to forcefully deny swirling allegations that he is under investigation by the country’s major law enforcement and intelligence agencies, calling the claims a deliberate fabrication designed to destabilize his party ahead of a critical rebuilding period.

When Botlhale Makgekgenene walked out of the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime last week, she did so the way she had run the agency: deliberately, without theatricals, and with a quiet insistence that the institution she was leaving behind was in better shape than the one she inherited.