Category: Sunday Standard

In a sporting calendar often defined by competition and trophies, an upcoming golf day in Gaborone is aiming for something far more meaningful – changing lives.

On Thursday, April 30, 2026, the fairways of Stanbic Bank Gaborone Golf Club will host the Play with Purpose – Autism Awareness Charity Golf Day. The event blends sport with advocacy, and is driven by one mother’s deeply personal journey.

Melissa Modise, a businesswoman, wife, and mother of two, is the force behind the initiative. Her inspiration comes from her six-year-old son, who was diagnosed with autism at the age of three – a moment that reshaped her family’s life.

‘What began as fear, shock, and confusion has become acceptance and determination,’ Modise shares. ‘We have been fortunate to access early intervention, therapies, and strong support. But that is not the reality for most families.’

Across Botswana, many parents raising children on the autism spectrum face are faced with a lack of adequate resources, information, or support. Early intervention, widely known to improve developmental outcomes, remains out of reach for many due to financial constraints, limited services, and a lack of awareness.

For Modise, the weight of the journey is undeniable. ‘It is mental exhaustion. It is financial strain. It is relationships tested to their core. And it’s often carried in silence, in a society that still does not fully understand autism.’

The upcoming golf day is designed to change this status quo. Play with Purpose is a call to action. It seeks to move beyond surface-level awareness toward meaningful understanding. It seeks to challenge misconceptions, break stigma, and create inclusive spaces where children on the spectrum are fully accepted.

‘We want children on the spectrum to be seen as part of everyday life, not exceptions. Inclusion is not kindness – it’s a necessity,’ Modise emphasizes.

Funds raised from the event will support Autism Botswana, a local organization dedicated to advocating for individuals on the autism spectrum and assisting their families. Autism Botswana works to raise awareness, provide resources, and push for a more inclusive society. And like many in the sector, it faces growing demand with limited resources.

The event also carries an educational message. Modise highlights that autism is not one-size-fits-all. Each child is unique, and communication is not always verbal. Understanding and meeting children where they are, she says, is key to true inclusion.

As golfers prepare to tee off, the message behind the event remains clear: this is about more than sport.

‘This is bigger than a golf day. ‘It is about changing mindsets, showing up for families who feel unseen, and giving children the chance not just to exist, but to thrive,’ she says.

Businesses and individuals are being called upon to support the initiative through sponsorships and participation, helping turn a day on the course into lasting impact beyond it.

Sometimes the most important victories aren’t recorded on a scorecard – but in the lives changed along the way.

Parliament has turned up the heat on government to overhaul Botswana’s veterinary disease control framework, calling for an urgent review and re-demarcation of livestock zones as pressure mounts from recurring outbreaks of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD).

The motion, tabled by Boteti West legislator Sam Digwa, targets sprawling zones such as 11 and 3B, arguing that their size undermines effective disease management. Lawmakers say the current structure makes it difficult to isolate outbreaks, deploy vaccines efficiently and enforce quarantine measures with precision. The motion also calls for urgent rehabilitation of veterinary cordon fences.

The push comes as government battles a widening outbreak first detected in Goodhope District. Acting Minister Edwin Dikoloti recently told a kgotla meeting that the disease has spread beyond initial containment areas, with confirmed cases reported at multiple crushes and a commercial feedlot. Authorities have since declared new infected zones under emergency regulations.

Officials concede the situation is fluid. Veterinary authorities have long argued that existing zones combine areas with varying risk levels, complicating surveillance and response efforts. The renewed outbreak has exposed these weaknesses, with cross-border transmission and internal movement controls proving difficult to manage.

Regionally, pressure is intensifying. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has recorded a surge in cases, pushing vaccine demand beyond supply. Botswana’s own production capacity is under strain, even as authorities race to restore disease-free status by 2028.

For farmers, the fallout is immediate. Movement restrictions are choking cattle sales and exports, while compliance costs rise. With beef exports tied to strict health standards, delays in reforming the zoning system risk deepening losses in one of Botswana’s most important agricultural sectors.

A high net worth tourist spent more than P800 000 of untraceable money on a safari in the Okavango Delta.

Years later, his identity remains unknown and so is the safari operator he paid. The anonymity is not accidental, it is structural. Botswana’s lucrative tourism industry is one of the rare global spaces where illicit wealth easily alchemizes into ordinary luxury.

That is the real story behind a footnote in the enforcement action against Wegelin and Co, a Swiss private bank, prosecuted in the United States of America (USA) for helping rich clients conceal undeclared offshore assets.

Buried in the case file is a single transaction, funds routed through the international banking system and spent on a safari in Botswana. No criminal charge hinges on the transaction. No safari operator has been named and no tourist has been identified. Yet the episode captures something larger than the case itself. It captures how, in a world where financial systems are highly effective at tracking movement but less effective at interpreting consumption, Botswana’s luxury tourism inevitably finds itself at the boundary between visibility and invisibility. It is the vortex where illicit wealth often does not vanish into secrecy, but instead reappears into the world as ordinary luxury.

According to luxury travel trackers like Dataintelo and Global Growth Insights, the Okavango Delta is grouped with locations like Sindalah Island and White Desert because it offers ‘Logistical Exclusivity’

The Dataintelo and Global Growth Insights place the Okavango Delta in a ‘league of three’ that defines the modern pinnacle of Ultra-High-Net-Worth (UHNW) travel.

The ‘League of Three’ is a conceptual classification used by luxury travel analysts and wealth intelligence experts to group the world’s most elite, inaccessible, and ultra-private destinations.

The publications further state that while destinations like St. Tropez or Aspen are for ‘seeing and being seen,’ the Delta, Sindalah, and White Desert are for ‘disappearing with distinction.’

Botswana’s tourism model is deliberately unusual. Unlike mass-market destinations that compete on volume, Botswana competes on exclusivity. Its wilderness areas, especially the Okavango Delta, are managed through a high cost, low volume strategy designed to protect fragile ecosystems.

The result is a tourism economy defined by scarcity; small camps rather than large resorts, limited guest number per concession, expensive logistics in remote terrain and premium pricing as a structural feature, not an exception.

A single safari can easily cost hundreds of thousands of Pula. Importantly, these prices are not artificially inflated, they reflect the real cost of operating in remote conservation zones with strict environmental controls.

But scarcity has another effect, it normalises high value transactions. When expensive payments are routine, they lose their statistical distinctiveness. That is why the more than P800 000 transfer by the anonymous net worth tourist does not stand out. It fits.

Modern anti money laundering frameworks, shaped by institutions such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), are designed to detect movement, unusual transfers, layered transactions, shell structures or rapid flows between accounts. Botswana’s high cost low volume transactions however fall through the cracks of FATF anti-money laundering framework. The transactions are direct purchase of a real service; they are a one-off transaction consistent with known market pricing and executed to a legitimate commercial entity. By the time the money reaches the Botswana tourism industry in its lifecycle, it has often already passed through multiple layers of banking infrastructure, private banks, correspondent banks and compliance screening systems. What remains is not ‘hidden money’ in motion. It is simply spending. And spending is the weakest signal in the entire FATF detection architecture.

Sunday Standard open source investigation suggests that the clients behind offshore structures like those once held at Wegelin were not necessarily engaged in complex criminal enterprises. Many were wealthy individuals who had accumulated assets during an era when offshore secrecy was normal, and enforcement was minimal or inconsistent.

The enforcement push that followed in the United States and Europe changed the rules. Undeclared wealth became a liability. But it did not disappear. Instead, it shifted from concealment to consumption. This is where Botswana’s tourism economy comes in, not because it enables wrongdoing, but because it is structurally compatible with the final stage of wealth usage.

A safari lodge does not need to interrogate the tax history of its guests. It delivers a service, guiding, accommodation and access to wilderness. The financial transaction is complete at the point of payment. The experience is the product.

The effectiveness of Botswana’s tourism sector as a destination for discreet high value spending is not rooted in opacity. It is rooted in legitimacy. The structural features matter most: High- end safaris are expensive by design and large payments are expected not exceptional. Unlike mass tourism markets, Botswana’s luxury sector processes relatively few but high-value transactions, reducing statistical anomaly detection. And once delivered, a safari leaves no financial residue to trace. It is consumed entirely in experience.

Bertelsmann Stiftung Index (BTI) 2026 Botswana Country Report has warned that emergency procurement measures during the Covid-19 pandemic created conditions that enabled corruption at senior levels of government even as the state battled a once-in-a-generation public health crisis.

According to the report, ‘corruption at senior levels grew following the suspension of public procurement procedures and the direct appointment of companies to supply personal protective equipment.’ The report highlighted how emergency decision-making frameworks weakened oversight mechanisms during the pandemic period.

The BTI assessment argues that the pandemic not only disrupted the economy but also exposed governance vulnerabilities. It states that Covid-19 ‘severely disrupted the economy, forcing the government to prioritize public health and declare a state of emergency,’ while simultaneously accelerating controversial procurement practices that would later draw public criticism and institutional concern.

The report situates the rise in corruption concerns within the broader context of crisis governance, where speed and emergency response took precedence over established accountability systems. The direct awarding of PPE contracts, according to BTI 2026, became a key flashpoint for allegations of abuse and preferential treatment, reinforcing long-standing concerns about transparency in public procurement.

While the report does not frame Botswana as a failed governance state, it warns that crisis conditions exposed structural weaknesses that had previously been less visible, particularly in procurement oversight and senior-level accountability.

The report observes that ‘the administration is committed to shifting from a mineral-based to a knowledge-based economy, promoting electric vehicles and strengthening agriculture,’ signalling an ambition to modernise the economic structure in the post-pandemic era. However, the transition is unfolding in a constrained fiscal environment. The BTI report warns that the current administration inherited ‘a fragile economy, with government investment accounts and foreign reserves nearly depleted,’ limiting immediate fiscal space for reform.

The new administration now faces substantial expectations from the electorate, including ambitious socio-economic commitments. According to BTI 2026, the government must grapple with ‘the mammoth task of implementing many of its electoral promises,’ including a proposed minimum wage of BWP 4,000, an old-age pension of BWP 1,800, and the creation of 450,000 jobs.

While Botswana has made measurable progress in basic service delivery, structural and logistical constraints persist. The BTI 2026 report, drawing on World Bank data, notes access levels of 92.6% for basic water, 80.6% for sanitation, and 75.9% for electricity in 2022.

However, it cautions that service delivery is undermined by ‘limited resources, corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies,’ while geographic dispersion creates additional cost pressures. The report also points to infrastructure vulnerabilities, including theft of electrical cables that disrupts power supply in some areas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stanbic Bank Botswana kept earnings largely unchanged in 2025, as strong growth in trading and fee income offset a sharp squeeze on lending margins in a year defined by tight liquidity and elevated funding costs.

Profit before tax edged up to P951.7 million from P949.7 million, while profit after tax rose slightly to P709.7 million. Stability at the headline level masked significant shifts in the bank’s income mix.

Net interest income fell 21.7 percent to P1.07 billion, as interest expenses surged 86.1 percent to P957.2 million, reflecting intense competition for deposits. The net interest margin narrowed to 3.7 percent from 4.9 percent, underscoring the pressure on traditional lending.

Non-interest income provided the offset. Revenue from trading, fees and commissions rose 62.5 percent to P941.6 million, driven by stronger performance in Global Markets, higher trade volumes and increased foreign exchange activity.

The shift was partly supported by changes in currency market dynamics after the Bank of Botswana widened the pula trading band in July 2025, boosting interbank foreign exchange activity and reducing reliance on the central bank.

Balance sheet growth remained subdued. Total loans and advances declined 9 percent to P21.3 billion, while customer deposits fell 2.1 percent to P22.7 billion, reflecting a more cautious approach to lending in a high-cost funding environment.

Asset quality showed some strain, with credit impairment charges rising to P84.6 million, though cost discipline improved. The cost-to-income ratio fell to 48.6 percent, and operating cash flow strengthened significantly.

The results highlight a shift in earnings drivers, with market activity increasingly compensating for pressure on core lending in a constrained liquidity environment.

Energy minister, Bogolo Kenewendo this week told parliament that high connection costs are limiting the pace of rural electrification, even as government maintains a longer-term commitment to expanding access.

Kenewendo said it remains economically unviable in some areas to extend electricity infrastructure, particularly to ploughing fields and sparsely populated zones where demand is low and distances are significant.

The minister’s response to MP Taolo Lucas underscores a structural challenge facing the country’s electrification drive: balancing universal access ambitions with the high capital costs of grid expansion. Officials indicated that, for now, reducing connection costs in such areas is not feasible, pointing instead to a phased approach.

Kenewendo said that the government will continue to extend electricity access progressively, while encouraging those with financial capacity to co-invest in connections where possible. The model reflects a shift toward shared funding mechanisms in cases where public investment alone may not be sufficient to justify rollout.

In parallel, the government is also focusing on institutional capacity building. ‘A new electricity-related training and certification programme has received approval from the Human Resource Development Council, with curriculum development at an advanced stage. The course is expected to combine theoretical and practical components, aimed at strengthening technical skills in the energy sector’, Kenewendo said.

Meanwhile the dual approach, targeted infrastructure expansion alongside skills development, highlights the government’s attempt to address both supply-side limitations and workforce readiness.

While electrification remains a policy priority, the update signals that near-term progress will likely be uneven, shaped by cost realities and the need for alternative financing models in low-density areas.