Asianet Pakistan Private Limited

Botswana’s public debt position has edged higher, driven largely by a sharp rise in domestic borrowing, according to the Annual Statements of Accounts (ASA) for the financial year ended 31 March 2023. in 2024, the Accountant General Office also raised concerns about the government’s borrowing practices highlighting a significant rise in total outstanding debt for the fiscal year 2021/22.

Accountant General Tebogo Tumango has now warned that while debt levels remain within manageable thresholds, the composition and pace of accumulation point to growing fiscal pressure, particularly on the domestic market.

‘There was a slight increase in total outstanding debt during the 2022/23 financial year, driven by growth in both external and domestic borrowing,’ Tumango noted in the report.

By the end of March 2023, total gross debt, including guarantees, stood at P50.90 billion, reflecting a 4 percent increase compared to the previous financial year. The rise was largely shaped by increased domestic financing needs, even as external debt recorded a modest decline.

External debt outstanding fell by 5 percent to P21.9 billion. The decrease was attributed to repayments exceeding new disbursements during the period under review, signalling a continued effort to manage foreign exposure and limit external vulnerabilities.

In contrast, domestic debt surged significantly, rising by 16 percent to P28.92 billion. The increase was driven by the continued rollout of the P30 billion Note Issuance Programme, which also saw Government intensifying its presence in the domestic capital market through more frequent auctions, shifting from quarterly to monthly issuances.

The programme was expanded following a 2019 review that identified structural constraints in the local bond market, leading to an increase in its ceiling from P15 billion in 2020. Authorities have since relied more heavily on domestic instruments to finance budgetary requirements.

Despite the increase in borrowing, Botswana’s debt ratios remain relatively low by international standards. The total debt-to-GDP ratio stood at 19.60 percent at the end of the 2022/23 financial year. External debt accounted for 8.46 percent of GDP, while domestic debt stood at 11.13 percent.

Government has also intensified revenue-enhancing measures in response to fiscal pressures. These include the revision of user fees and service charges, with the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development authorised to adjust charges annually in line with inflation or other applicable rates, following consultation with relevant ministries.

Consultations were ongoing during the 2022/23 financial year in preparation for the third phase of revised fees and charges. Officials say the measures form part of broader fiscal consolidation efforts aimed at widening the domestic revenue base and ensuring long-term fiscal sustainability amid rising expenditure demands.

I am continuing this month with my BlackBerry story.

Yes, BlackBerry today is a leading security company. Yes, its technology is still used by major organisations across the world. But the handset – the very thing that defined its identity – is nowhere to be found. The PlayBook tablet never conquered the market. So what really went wrong?

As I mentioned before, I was an analyst based in Slough while the rest of my team was in Canada. I worked as a Technical Change Analyst within an IT service management environment, and that perspective has stayed with me. From where I sat, BlackBerry was still powerful. It had the brand, the capability, and the story. Which is why the question has never been simple.

Was it management?

Was it IT governance?

Was it the data centre outage in Paris that shook global confidence?

Or was it the pressure to release products like the PlayBook before they were truly ready?

The PlayBook remains one of the clearest examples of pressure overtaking process. It launched without native email, calendar, or contacts – a decision widely criticised at the time and one that contradicted BlackBerry’s core identity as a communication-first company. A stronger release governance model would have delayed that launch until it met minimum viable standards aligned to user expectations.

To this day, I still reflect on that journey. I speak to some of my former peers – including one who worked as a data centre technician – and even now, there isn’t a single, clear answer. How does a company that was once flourishing lose direction?

I get goosebumps thinking about it.

What I do know is this: pressure changes decision-making. Having worked within Fortune 500, FTSE 100 and CAC 40 environments, I understand the level of pressure that comes with operating at that scale. In these organisations, you are not only delivering technology – you are protecting reputation, shareholder value, and public trust. Every incident is visible. Every failure is amplified by global media.

And that is where governance matters.If your IT governance is weak, your foundation is weak. Without strong ITIL practices and disciplined IT service management, you are exposing the very backbone of your business.

Continuous Service Improvement (CSI) is not optional – it is essential. It ensures that lessons are learned, risks are reduced, and services evolve with the market.

That is why I always emphasise the importance of IT governance – and the critical role of risk management within change and release processes.

Every decision to release a product must be interrogated. Why this deadline? Why this product, at this point in the market? Do we have the engineering capability to support it? Do we have the capacity to sustain it under pressure?

And more importantly – if something goes wrong, how quickly can we recover without causing major incidents?

These are not theoretical questions. They sit at the heart of operational resilience.

A well-managed change environment requires more than speed; it requires control. A properly maintained Configuration Management Database (CMDB) should provide visibility of systems, dependencies, and impact – guiding decision-making before, during, and after deployment.

Because when governance fails, the consequences are immediate.

Your brand is questioned.

Your revenue is affected.

And most critically, your customers lose confidence in your technology.

And once trust is lost in technology, it is incredibly difficult to rebuild.

The 2011 EMEA outage, widely reported across global media, exposed exactly what happens when resilience and recovery are not strong enough. A core network failure, combined with limitations in the backup systems, led to prolonged service disruption affecting millions of users. Robust disaster recovery design – including fully independent failover capabilities and clearer communication strategies – could have reduced both the impact and the loss of trust.

I had already moved on to Ericsson at the time, but I remember the shock. The disbelief. Watching events unfold while speaking to former colleagues. Even today, some of them cannot fully explain what went wrong.

For me, that moment symbolised something bigger than a technical failure – it was a breakdown in control, communication, and confidence.

But beyond systems and processes, there is leadership.

Not BlackBerry leadership specifically – but leadership in general.True leadership is not threatened by the people it leads. It listens. It aligns with strategy. It respects the vision of the founders while allowing teams to challenge, innovate, and improve. Your teams are your eyes and ears. If their voices are ignored, the organisation loses its ability to adapt.

Continuous Service Improvement (CSI) depends on that openness.

And yet, despite everything, I do not see this as a story of failure.

BlackBerry was never just about devices. It was about security – a level of encryption and trust that was ahead of its time. While the market shifted towards touchscreens and consumer-driven design, BlackBerry’s strength remained in protecting data and safeguarding communication.

That is why it still exists today.

Do I think BlackBerry will return with a new handset?

I hope so.

Because its design is timeless. You can recognise it instantly. It is classic. And it still works – I even have a friend who still uses their very first device.

But whether it returns to hardware or not, its legacy is secure.

The biggest stakeholder will always be the public. They decide what succeeds. Meeting their needs, responding effectively to incidents, and building resilient systems – that is what sustains any technology company.

I am proud of what BlackBerry was.

And I am proud of what it became.

Most importantly, I am proud of my journey.

I can say this with confidence: an African, a Black girl, walked into a Fortune 500 company that once produced the number one smartphone in the world – and she didn’t just observe.

She contributed. She tested systems. She stopped changes. She was part of something global.

And that is something no market shift can ever take away.

Few examples illustrate the transformation better than the importation of 162 cattle from Texas in 2023 under the administration of the former president Mokgweetsi Masisi. At the time, the purchase costing about P25m once transport and logistics were included was presented as a bold effort to improve the national herd.

It was also presented, by those now in power, as something else entirely.

Parliamentary committees were later told that the procurement had not been budgeted for and may have been unlawful. A revelation delivered with admirable bluntness before the electorate rearranged the seating plan.

That change has since required a certain intellectual agility. The cattle have not moved. They remain in Ramatlabama, adapting to local conditions and contributing, at least in theory, to the production of semen and embryos intended to improve the local livestock genetics.

What has moved is the explanation.

The matter resurfaced in Parliament when Dr Kesitegile Gobotswang inquired whether the purchase complied with public finance law, which vote had been used, and what role had been played by the National Agricultural Research and Development Institute.

It was a question that once would have been followed by emphatic agreement. Instead, it was followed by documentation.

The government responded with composure. The cattle, it explained, were not an isolated indulgence but part of a P93m project to refurbish the Ramatlabama Artificial Insemination Centre, an effort approved in March 2023 and designed to elevate the country into a centre of excellence in bovine reproduction. The animals themselves accounted for P22m of this broader ambition.

Embedded within such a framework, the purchase begins to look less like extravagance and more like policy.

The procurement method has undergone a similar rehabilitation. What the then opposition had regarded as suspiciously uncompetitive is now described as direct procurement, permissible under the law when circumstances justify it. In this case, the justification rests on the delicate matter of genetics. Elite cattle, it appears, cannot be expected to participate in open tender processes; they must be selected.

To that end, a multidisciplinary scouting team was dispatched to Texas, an expedition combining procurement oversight, veterinary science, legal expertise and animal breeding, all in pursuit of cows with the correct international outlook. There remain, inevitably, small complications. The absence of NARDI from the process has been acknowledged, though now with the tone of a procedural footnote rather than a constitutional crisis. Earlier claims that Parliament had not approved the expenditure have not so much been disproved as absorbed into a more expansive narrative about development planning and institutional processes.

Such reinterpretations are not unique to Botswana. Across democracies, incoming governments inherit not only policies but also the inconvenient persistence of facts. When reversal proves cumbersome, reinterpretation offers a more elegant solution.

Thus the Texas cattle have completed a journey more remarkable than their flight across the Atlantic. Once a symbol of alleged impropriety, they have become instruments of national development. Once cited as evidence of excess, they are now examples of foresight.

The transformation owes less to any change in the animals themselves than to a change in vantage point. From the opposition benches, they were a scandal. From the front bench, they are strategy. In politics, as in agriculture, perspective is everything.

The United States tax evasion prosecution against Wegelin and Co, Switzerland’s oldest private bank before it collapsed, has stumbled on a US $60, 000 safari expenditure that has exposed a blind spot in Botswana’s financial defence against money laundering.

The money laundering case has further revealed how tourism, one of Botswana’s flagship industries is perfectly structured to be blind to the moment when illicit wealth exits the shadows and enters the real economy disguised as ordinary consumption.

Sunday Standard open source investigation suggests that the US $60, 000 dirty money arrived in Botswana the way clean money often does – quietly, electronically, and with no obvious reason to doubt it.

Somewhere in the Okavango tourism circuit, a safari operator received a series of international payments totaling roughly $60, 000. For luxury safari, it was unremarkable. High-end lodges routinely bill that much for a week in the bush; private guides, charter flights, exclusive concessions. Nothing about the transaction screamed suspicion.

But the money’s journey tells a different story. It began in Switzerland, inside accounts at Wegelin and Co, the country’s oldest private bank before it collapsed under the weight of a US tax evasion prosecution. The client behind those accounts had not declared them to U.S authorities. When he wanted to spend, he didn’t repatriate the funds in his own name. Instead, he instructed the bank to move the money outward – carefully.

The payments were routed through the United States financial system, where dollar transactions often pass, even when neither sender nor recipient is American. That detour proved decisive. U.S investigators, piecing together patterns of undeclared offshore wealth, captured the transfers in court filings. Among them, wires sent to a ‘safari company’ in Botswana.

The name of the Botswana company never appears in the record. It is simply ‘the safari company’ – a placeholder in a legal narrative focused elsewhere.

And the omission is the point.

By the time the money reached Botswana, it had been laundered not through shell companies or fake invoices, but through something far harder to detect, normality. A legitimate business. A plausible expense. A payment size consistent with the market.

The whole transaction flew below the Botswana Financial Intelligence Agency (FIA) detection radar. There were no red flags that a local bank could reasonably act on. No sudden spike in activity, no mismatch between the company’s profile and the transaction. Just a foreign client paying for a safari. This is the structural blind spot. Botswana’s anti-money laundering framework, shaped in part by reforms following its grey-listing by the Financial Action Task Force between 2018 and 2021, leans heavily on risk-based detection. Banks are expected to flag unusual behavior, identify suspicious clients, and report anomalies. But the system is nor designed to question every legitimate looking payment, nor could it function if it tried.

When undeclared wealth is spent on tourism, property or services, rather than hidden, it blends seamlessly into the legal economy. The transaction that paid for a safari in Botswana looked, in every operational sense, clean. The crime existed upstream, in tax evasion and concealment and not in the final payment of safari services.

Detection, in this case, did not happen in Gaborone. It happened because the U.S authorities had visibility into dollar clearing systems and the legal leverage to compel disclosures from a foreign bank. Botswana, like most countries does not have that vantage point.

That dependence on external detection is not unique. It is a feature of the global financial system. Smaller jurisdictions, especially those integrated into international banking networks, rely on larger financial centers to surface risks that originate beyond their borders. But it creates a gap. Tourism, one of Botswana’s flagship industries sits squarely inside that gap. It attracts wealthy international clients, processes cross border payments and delivers high value services that justify large transfers. It is perfectly structured to receive funds that are both legitimate in use and illicit in origin.

There is no evidence the Botswana safari company involved in the Wegelin case did anything wrong. On the contrary, the available facts suggest that it may have simply provided a service and been paid accordingly. Yet its anonymity in the court record underscores a deeper reality; the system had no reason to notice it at all. And that the paradox at the heart of modern money laundering oversight. Regulations can tighten reporting rules, improve financial intelligence units, and demand greater transparency from banks. Botswana has done all that in recent years. But none of those measures fully address the moment when illicit wealth exits the shadows and enters the real economy disguised as ordinary consumption.