Mike Chase on Botswanas biggest elephant dilemma
Monday, May 09, 2016
Travelling on a Safari vehicle from Chobe Game Lodge to the Kasane Airport, a wide-ranging conversation with Map Ives, the National Rhino Coordinator, touches on elephants and quickly moves on to Mike Chase. Ives says: “Mike has amassed a lot of information and knowledge and I think sometimes it weighs down on him. You can tell from his eyes.”
We concurred on this after sitting in an hour-long exclusive interview with Chase, noting his occasional quiet, distant stares in mid-sentence as if he wanted to choose the right information from his bank of knowledge from ground-breaking research on elephants and zebras in Africa.
These are not ordinary times. Yet, history reminds us that this nation has navigated difficult waters before and did so by clinging firmly to the principles of prudence and macroeconomic stability. From independence in 1966, Botswana chose a path few resource-rich countries managed to sustain. Diamond revenues were not treated as windfalls for reckless expansion, but as capital to be managed with caution. The establishment of fiscal rules,...