Botswana’s medicine shortage is no laughing matter, but sometimes humour is the best way to highlight the absurdity.in a nice packet of rooibos tea instead?’ It’s almost like medicines in Botswana have gone on safari — rare sightings, everyone whispers when they appear, and if you’re lucky enough to catch them, you guard them like treasure. It’s almost comical how governments sometimes try to ‘spin’ a crisis into a success story. In Botswana’s case, the shortage of medicines has been met with a kind of PR gymnastics that feels like watching someone try to hold up a breaking dam with a can. Officials proudly announce, "We have secured a shipment of vital medicines!" — only for it to turn out to be two boxes of cough syrup and a lonely packet of paracetamol.
Citizens are told to ‘remain calm’ while pharmacies resemble empty shelves at a Black Friday sale. More and more, the procurement departments seem to have given up on competency. My journey to find my BP medication involved visiting four government clinics and coming up with nothing. It felt less like healthcare and more like a Diacore Marathon challenge where you run all day and your time still doesn’t qualify for a medal. Armed with determination (and rising BP readings), I marched into Clinic One. The pharmacist smiled apologetically: "Stock finished". Clinic Two greeted me with a handwritten sign that might as well have said, ‘Abandon hope, ye who enter here.’ Clinic Three: This one felt promising. The nurse checked the shelves and then whispered: "We had medicine yesterday... but it is gone". Apparently, paracetamol now has legs. Clinic Four: The queue was longer than a ticket line at the National Stadium during World Relays, only for the shelves to reveal... nothing.
