Tholwana Borethe � Can anything good emerge from this unlikely tangle?

When I first learnt that the Botswana Congress Party (BCP) had lodged a complaint with the police about four newspaper editors, it seemed that it had embarked on a gamble which had the very real potential to backfire.  The BCP’s action is without precedent. But then there have been other developments which even a few years ago would have seemed unlikely ever to occur. There has been, for instance, the President against the National Assembly and the Chief Justice against the Judges.

If any action was to be taken against the independent newspapers it would have been assumed that this would have been initiated either by the government or by the police. How many of us could have imagined that this action was instead taken by one of the opposition parties! It is generally believed that the commercial newspapers are anti-government.