For much of the past three years, the story of artificial intelligence has been told in superlatives. Trillions of parameters. Billions of dollars in compute. Data centers rising like cathedrals across the deserts of the American Southwest and the fjords of Northern Europe, each one a monument to the belief that intelligence scales with size. But a quieter, and in some ways more subversive, argument is now gathering force – and it is coming from...
She walked into the ring at Phala Phala with the unhurried bearing of an animal that did not yet know she was about to make history. By the time the gavel fell, Queen Arusha – ear tag NANK23 001, an in-calf Ankole heifer offered as Lot 20 – had sold for R6,4 million to an anonymous buyer, the highest price ever paid in South Africa for a female animal, across every cattle breed in the...
For six years, Khaby Lame conquered the internet without uttering a word. A shrug. A deadpan stare. Two upturned palms and that now-iconic gesture – this is the simple way. It was a language without translation, humor without captions, fame without borders. And it carried a laid-off factory worker from the outskirts of Turin to the summit of the world’s largest social platform. Now, in one of the most consequential transactions ever struck in the...
For years, the governing assumption in Africa’s fast-growing gaming industry has been that regulators face a trade-off: tighten the rules and risk strangling a lucrative market, or let the market run and risk leaving players exposed. At the 17th Annual GRAF Compliance Conference here, Evidentia AI set out to dismantle that assumption. Safer play and a thriving gaming economy, the company argued, are not opposing forces. Both rest on the same foundation – regulation that...
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...
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...
The National Amalgamated Local and Central Government and Parastatal Workers Union has asked the High Court in Maun to prevent the government from implementing its Leadership Transformation Programme among public servants represented by the union without first negotiating with it. The union, known as NALCGPWU, has cited the Attorney General, representing the Government of Botswana, as the respondent. In court papers, the union argues that the programme addresses matters already covered by the Botswana Public...
The University of Botswana (UB) is set to confer an honorary Doctor of Letters, honoris causa (DLitt), on internationally acclaimed San rights activist, Mr Roy Sesana, in recognition of his lifelong commitment to defending the rights, cultural identity and dignity of one of Botswana’s historically marginalised communities. Mr Sesana will receive the honour during UB’s 44th Graduation Ceremonies scheduled for 21st – 23rd of October 2026 at the UB Campus Indoor Sports Centre. As Botswana...
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...
Botswana’s export earnings rose to P5.16 billion in July 2026, driven largely by diamonds and copper as the country seeks to reduce its dependence on mineral exports. According to the latest International Merchandise Trade Statistics monthly digest, exports increased 2.0% from the revised P5.06 billion recorded in June. The improvement came as imports declined, though Botswana still posted a substantial trade deficit, underscoring the gap between the country’s export capacity and its demand for goods...
