I was fortunate to visit Botswana in April to assist in the delivery of a Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management (CAPAM) workshop on Financial Administration and Accountability - working with Canadians David Waung and Carl Taylor.
The country is very impressive in many ways and appears to have benefited substantially from avoiding full colonial dependency in the 19th Century - thanks to its peripheral / buffer zone location between the Boer Republics and the British Empire. There is a quiet confidence among many professionals, accompanied by commensurate competence. In recent years, it has had the additional luxury of development fuelled by substantial revenues from mining (especially diamonds).
It is not without its problems though. A USAID health worker told me that one third of the women who go through the country's maternity services test HIV positive.
On flying into Johannesburg, I was amazed to look down and see European-type farms rolling out beneath the plane. This was very different from the peasant farmer landscapes that I got to know so well in Nigeria and Tanzania in the 1970s. Nice though to re-fly some of the territory that my father Jay must have become acquainted with during his wartime training in South Africa with the RAF.
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