Shashe

 In this post I use the following abbreviations: ISS Act– Intelligence and Security Service Act. DIS – Directorate of Intelligence and Security. BDP – Botswana Democratic Party. Whenever Minister in the State Presidency, Kabo Morwaeng is quizzed by the press concerning alleged cruelty and other transgressions of the DIS, a spy agency in his ministry, he always defends the spy agency by claiming that it (the DIS) always acts according to the law. I have not heard him say what law, let alone whether such law is permissible under a democratic dispensation such as ours. I therefore can only assume that the law he is referring to is the Intelligence and Security Service (ISS) Act, Chapter 23:02, which Act established the DIS together with all its associated committees, council, community etc.  Given that Minister Morwaeng is a lawyer by training, I have had to look at the ISS Act to gauge the truth or otherwise of his claims. What I found is profoundly shocking. The minister is rig...

Palestine/Israel:   The architects of Apartheid in South Africa insisted that they were implementing an "n" state solution where "n" is the number of independent states. Their "n" was composed of such Bantustans as BophutaTswana, Transkei, Ciskei, KwaZulu etc. We (rightly) vilified them and fought to destroy their unacceptable designs in our continent. Many people died in the process. Today people are advocating for the creation of another "n" state solution with "n=2" in Palestine/Israel. They call it a 2 state solution. Hendrick Vervoed must be dancing in his grave! Botswana: UDC vs IEC I listened to part of the judgement reading. An interesting point made was that if the UDC were granted the right to observe the voter registration, then other political actors (presumably, BDP, BCP etc) would also be so granted. Now this is strange, because the government insists that ONLY the 94 or so Basarwa who sued and won the right to stay in the...

 As we are all aware, the rock hewn churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia, are a micro version of the Holy Land. And Gaza, in the Holy Land, is burning right now! One wonders who this King Lalibela was. How did he manage to employ "angels" to carry out the hewing at night, while humans labored during the day? Is it perhaps the Holy Land that was settled by people who originated from Lalibela, thereby rendering the Holy Land a copy of Lalibela and not the other way around? The burial of King Tutankhamun was a bold statement "Here lies a Khurutshe (Russian)!" The gold (zolota) mask needs no further explanation. What some may have missed are the golden baboons in the tomb. The baboon is the totem of Bakhurutshe. And so the last Pharaoh in the line of Pharaohs from whom the Jews are descended was a Khurutshe (Russian). And these Pharaohs were then expelled, onwards to Palestine. The god Nana Sin took over from there to guide them to the "promised" land. It seems to...

I am not going to call him a Motswana, even though his ancestors were here in Botswana, thousands of years before the country was known as Botswana. I am going to call him what he was - NKHWA. Son of the soil, progenitor of us all. He died in 2021, more than two years ago, but he still remains unburied because his birthplace has been declared a game reserve by a heartless government. He wished to be buried there, in that "Game Reserve". His family, rightly wishes to fulfil his wishes by burying him in the "game reserve". And the rest of us "Batswana" are watching and seemingly enjoying it. How can we allow a government which claims to have been elected by the majority of us, to treat the remains of one of us the way this government is doing in the case of Rre Gaotlhobogwe? It's not as though no one is being buried in the Central Kalahari  Game Reserve (CKGR)  any more. There are people who had to go to court and won their case to remain in the CKGR. Wh...

 The Patriot on Sunday newspaper of 11th December 2022 reported that Botswana has won the bid to host the 18th session of the Inter-Governmental Committee Convention for Safeguarding the Intangible, Cultural Heritage in a year’s time. The report further states that the Minister of Youth, Gender, Sport, and Culture announcing this at a press conference, said that the convention’s aim is to safeguard oral traditions and expressions, performing arts, etc. The report shocked me. How does a country that has outlawed the use of what was the most widely spoken language when the European colonialists arrived here in the late nineteenth century, the Ikalanga language, even get considered as a possible venue to host such a cultural convention? And it is not just Ikalanga language that is being eliminated from the national cultural endowment.  Before the arrival of Europeans Ikalanga was the most widely spoken language, for the simple reason that virtually all the different tribes had ev...

 The extent to which access to CORRECT information is denied to citizens in Botswana is astounding. At the last census, to the question on "language normally used at home" I answered "Kalanga". The enumerator over ruled me and wrote "Setswana". Now the results of that census are going to be used to partly determine how district administration is configured. Lies...Lies...and nothing but Lies! The recently "promoted" districts have not been published in any map to accompany the Government gazette in which they are described. The coordinate system used to describe the new districts is so complicated that not even the Department of Surveys and mapping will tell you the name of the system, let alone show you how to convert the coordinates so supplied to simple longitude and latitude. In short, the Government gazette describing the new administrative districts is completely inexplicable even to graduates like me!  Democracy is denied when people are d...

 Our country’s name, Botswana, meaning “land of the Tswanas” needs to be changed if future inter-tribal strife is to be avoided. The name was given to the newly independent republic in 1966 by the then minority Tswana speaking tribes against massive protestations of the rest of the population. For obvious reasons I cannot send this contribution to the ongoing Constitutional review exercise.  I sincerely hope that this open contribution to the review exercise, while not original in substance, will somehow come to the notice of the Constitutional Review Commission nonetheless. 1. The boundaries of our country were conceived, not by colonial Britain, but by the Anunnaki, when man was created. The British merely transferred the concept from paper to the land. 2. The point of reference was Shashe, now called Mapungubwe hill. The mighty Shashe river was named after the hill, because its confluence with the Limpopo river is directly opposite the hill. 3. If the Anunnaki envisaged an ...