Shashe

Wise advice: Ignore this new political configuration at your peril!  Many people have pointed out that our country, Botswana is trying to run itself as both a republic and a multi-monarchy. Some people I have spoken with, and with whom I strongly concur, have taken the decision to chart our country a more practicable path than the bipolar configuration favoured and actively being pursued by the “major” tribal chiefs in our republic. The envisaged path is for the country to become unapologetically and wholly, a republic. The name of the republic will have to change from the current tribal name of “Botswana”.  The political vehicle planned to bring about these changes is a new political party named “Detribalize Our Country/Continent (D.O.C)”. In our country tribes will continue to exist as the Anunnaki made them. This means obviously, that each tribe that is still in our country will be only a very small fraction of the human group falling under that tribe. The link between a tr...

 Many incidents of gender based violence (GBV) between unmarried, co-habiting couples result from one member of the couple deciding to break away AND TAKE THE CHILD/REN to his/her new “love” partnership. Does Roman-Dutch law have a remedy for this? I don’t know, but I doubt that it does. In Kalanga culture, and I am no expert in Kalanga culture, the stated problem does not arise, because unmarried people do not live together, and a child born out of wedlock belongs solely to its mother and her family. You may wonder then how the “biological” father’s interests are safeguarded concerning the child’s welfare and/or upbringing. This is where Kalanga culture really steps up to the plate.  If it is NOT the woman’s first child, then nothing happens, because the woman is “ gwimba ”, meaning that she, together with her new offspring simply remains an unmarried member of her parents’ extended family.  However if it IS the woman’s first child, a whole slew of cultural processes fol...

 Of late the topic of GBV has been a hot topic of debate; indeed it still is. Disturbing statistics have been revealed by Police showing how men, mostly males, kill or maim their female counterparts. However, I am curious about two stats that seem to be always missing from what is revealed. How many of the couples involved are married and how many are not? Was the relevant data deliberately ignored during collection, or was it considered “irrelevant”?  Do the revealed stats include same-sex couples? Is violence involving same-sex couples considered GBV, and if so how does it fit into the men versus women paradigm? Look, as one prominent lawyer (let’s withhold his name for now) has always held, our society is generally violent, and GBV is just one manifestation of that violent social configuration. Many of us agree. You see, every wo(man) in society accepts that s/he lives in a just society. If not, s/he changes that society, violently if need be. There is expectation from ever...

 I was hoping that the 13:00 Hrs Radio Botswana news bulletin would carry some explanation as to why there has not been Electricity in some villages along the A3 highway for more than thirty (30) hours now. No explanation was forthcoming. However I learnt that President Boko is away overseas. Could that perhaps be an explanation as to why this very unusually long power outage? Where is Botswana Power Corporation (BPC)? Surely we as consumers of their product deserve some explanation for this!

 An interesting report about the position of the law in relation to Ponzi schemes in our country has just aired on Botswana Television (Btv), facilitated by an official from First National Bank Botswana. I first became aware of Ponzi schemes through reading educative newspaper expose’s by such personalities as, forgive me if I’m wrong, Richard Harriman. From what I learnt in newspapers, I was able to follow how easily Batswana lost their money to such fraudsters. Never did it occur to me that I would one day read about how our taxes were splashed by a Government Department into a Ponzi scheme. The case I am referring to is the well documented case of how the local Government in the Kweneng District invested, and lost, millions of tax payers’ money into a Ponzi scheme run by some shady company whose name I no longer remember. What I still remember is that there were allegations flying thick and fast to the effect that the  Kweneng District Council (KDC) Chairman at the time was...