Botswana ranked 30th peaceful nation
Lebogang Mosikare | Friday June 21, 2019 12:33
Botswana dropped one place on the rankings.
The drop in the index may be partly attributed to the increased house breaking, murder and rape cases.
Some of the measures of peacefulness include: number of homicides per 100,000 people, likelihood of violent demonstrations, political instability, level of violent crime, number of jailed population per 100,000 people, ease of access to small arms and light weapons, number of deaths from organised internal conflict, military expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), financial contribution to United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions and relations with neighbouring countries.
During the Eighth Annual National Community Policing Cluster Awards that were held in Francistown last year, the Commissioner of the Botswana Police Service (BPS) Keabetswe Makgophe said that he was ecstatic because in 2017, decreases were recorded in the number of violent and intrusive crimes by 4.5 percent and serious crimes by 2.2 percent and cumulatively by 3.7 percent from 14,224 in 2016 to 13,704 in 2017.
However, Makgophe bemoaned the fact that despite these encouraging results, there is a worrying trend of the increase in house breaking, murder and rape cases.
The recent heinous case that sent shivers down the spines of the general public involves murder accused, Kativa Diwanga, who is alleged to have grisly killed a family of three in Gaborone.
While Botswana cannot economically match the economies of the United States of America (US), France and United Kingdom (UK), who are ranked 45th, 60th and 128th respectively, Botswana is above them in the Global Peace Index.
The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) compiles the Global Peace Index.
The IEP is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank dedicated to shifting the world’s focus to peace as a positive, achievable, and tangible measure of human well being and progress. IEP achieves its goals by developing new conceptual frameworks to define peacefulness; providing metrics for measuring peace; and uncovering the relationships between business, peace and prosperity as well as promoting a better understanding of the cultural, economic and political factors that create peace.
IEP is headquartered in Sydney, Australia with offices in New York, The Hague, Mexico City and Brussels.
It works with a wide range of partners internationally and collaborates with intergovernmental organisations on measuring and communicating the economic value of peace.
Iceland has held its position as the most ‘peaceful’ nation on Earth, according to this year’s Global Peace Index.
In addition, the world’s overall ‘peacefulness’ has improved for the first time in five years - although only marginally.
Afghanistan was bottom of the list, moving below even Syria, while South Sudan, Yemen and Iraq were all in the bottom five.
The report measures the ‘peacefulness’ of 163 countries with a range of measures including military spending and deaths from conflict and terrorism, as well as an estimated economic cost of violence.