Only weeks ago, Noah Salakae sat at the polished tables of Botswana’s Cabinet, entrusted with one of the government’s most consequential portfolios: Transport and Infrastructure. Today, the former minister is preparing to stand before a magistrate court on corruption charges, his political career hanging by a thread and his party wrestling with the implications of a scandal that reaches into its own ranks.
Salakae is scheduled to appear in court on Aug. 28, following an investigation by the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime, the country’s premier anti-graft agency. The charges center on a multibillion-pula infrastructure program overseen by his ministry; chief among them, the construction of the Ghanzi-New Xade road, a ribbon of asphalt cutting through Botswana’s arid west that was supposed to symbolize the government’s commitment to connecting its remotest communities.
Instead, the road has become the backbone of a criminal case.
According to the DCEC, Salakae received roughly 1.6 million pula in cash, a Toyota Fortuner valued at 575,000 pula, and bush-clearing services in exchange for his alleged influence over a government contract worth more than 1.45 billion pula awarded to Tau Grading and Construction (Pty) Ltd. The figures are staggering by the standards of Botswana, a nation of 2.4 million people where the average monthly wage hovers around 5,600 pula.
Salakae has rejected every allegation. But rather than retreat into silence, he has gone on the offensive; and in doing so, he has turned a personal legal battle into a broader confrontation over the integrity of Botswana’s democratic institutions.
Addressing Parliament after his resignation from Cabinet, Salakae accused security and anti-corruption agencies of being “weaponised” against him. The issue, he argued, was larger than his own name. “This country needs a justice system that is transparent,” he said, “one that cannot be used to crush innocent citizens.”
The DCEC pushed back swiftly. In a statement that carried the weight of institutional self-defense, the agency dismissed any suggestion of political motivation, insisting that it conducts its investigations “impartially and without prejudice.” Allegations that it was being used for political purposes, it said, were “false and misleading.”
What makes the clash extraordinary is the political geometry that produced it. Salakae, a longtime opposition figure who spent years challenging the government from the back benches, now faces allegations brought by a state institution under the very administration he helped bring to power. The man who once railed against the machinery of government is now caught inside it.
To understand Salakae’s predicament, and the tremors it has sent through Botswana’s political landscape, it is necessary to go back several years, to a bitter rupture that foreshadowed the current crisis.
In 2018, Salakae resigned as national treasurer of the Botswana National Front in a dramatic falling-out with the party leadership. His resignation letter was a grenade rolled across the conference table. He accused the party’s Central Committee of existing “only in name” and complained that the organization was being run by what he described as “Boko’s bodyguards”; a pointed reference to President Duma Boko, who then led the BNF and now leads the country.
The episode exposed fault lines within the BNF that had been widening for years. Salakae aligned himself with factions critical of Boko’s leadership, and for a time, the two men occupied opposite corners of the same party.
Politics, however, has a way of reconciling enemies when power is at stake. The two eventually found themselves on the same side again, united under the Umbrella for Democratic Change coalition. When the UDC swept to power in the 2024 general elections in a landslide that ended decades of Botswana Democratic Party dominance, Salakae’s political fortunes were transformed along with the country’s.
He had lost Ghanzi North in 2019. Now, running under the newly configured Ghanzi constituency, he won by a comfortable margin. Boko rewarded him with the Transport and Infrastructure portfolio — one of the most important jobs in government, overseeing the roads, railways and transport entities that bind together a country the size of France.
It was a remarkable comeback for a politician who had endured electoral defeat and an unsuccessful legal challenge. Cabinet represented the highest point of Salakae’s career.
But his time in government would prove short-lived.
Sources close to Salakae say his fall from Cabinet was not the product of a single scandal but the culmination of mounting tensions and controversies that eroded his position week by week.
The first flashpoint was a public transport fare controversy that caught the ministry flat-footed. Fare increases were announced that differed from those approved by Cabinet, and the resulting backlash led to the suspension of Bokhutlo Modukanele, the director of Road Transport Services. But sources within Salakae’s camp say the suspended director was not solely responsible: Salakae was away at the time, they contend, and had not been adequately briefed on the fare adjustments. The episode, they argue, exposed deeper problems of communication and coordination within the ministry; and added to the political pressure closing in around the minister.
The bigger test, however, was Botswana Railways.
President Boko had set ambitious targets for state-owned transport entities, insisting that both Botswana Railways and Air Botswana must move toward profitability. He had previously said he expected the entities to become self-sustaining, and more recently he publicly warned Salakae that his “head is on the block” over Botswana Railways’ performance — a striking phrase from a president to his own minister, delivered not in a private meeting but in full view of the public.
For Salakae’s allies, the warning was part of a broader campaign of pressure that had been building around the minister. The fare controversy, the scrutiny of state-owned enterprises, the corruption investigation; these were not isolated episodes, they argue, but intersecting lines of political strain that eventually snapped.
From minister to accused person. The trajectory is blunt, and Salakae appears determined not to let it define the next chapter.
On Aug. 24, four days before his scheduled court appearance, he is expected to address a kgotla meeting in Ghanzi; a traditional community gathering that, in Botswana, doubles as a barometer of political sentiment. The meeting is likely to attract significant attention: constituents will want answers, and the former minister will need to give them.
There has been speculation that Salakae could resign from Parliament following his departure from Cabinet. But sources indicate that this is not currently the plan. Instead, he is expected to remain in Parliament and continue his fight from within; a decision that reflects both political calculation and personal stubbornness.
Salakae is believed to harbor ambitions for a senior position in the BNF, including the party’s vice-presidency. Whether those ambitions survive the corruption charges, and the court of public opinion that precedes any legal verdict, remains an open question.
What is clear is that Salakae’s case has become more than a matter of individual accountability. It is a test of the institutions he has accused of being weaponized, and of the government that once welcomed him into its inner circle. The road that was meant to connect Ghanzi to New Xade now leads to a courtroom, and the journey will shape not just one politician’s future, but Botswana’s uneasy reckoning with the promises of its new political era.