De Beers to Switch Its Diamond Trading Activities to Botswana From London

Bloomberg

“De Beers should benefit from a longer agreement as it removes the periodic disruption in having to wrestle with a new pact every five years,” Des Kilalea, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets Ltd. in London, said in an e-mailed note. “In a world with looming tightness in rough diamond supply, the certainty of a long-term agreement over the world’s largest source of rough is welcome.”

Botswana IT service performance poor

The main problem or challenge in Botswana is Wide Area Network (WAN) and Application service delivery. If for example you want to download a form from the Ministry of Trade and Industry website to register a company, you will be lucky to manage to download and print the form. It takes more than 10 minutes to buy the Government Gazette because the system is very slow. This is true with most government and parastatals IT systems, especially revenue systems, which normally involve serious authentication processes. I am not attacking any ministry or company here; I am just using them as examples. Standard Chartered Bank Botswana is also often affected by a high system downtime and it is likely that it is because of their WAN Service by BTC. So the government WAN, as well as WAN networks for the private sector, including banks and parastatals are not optimized to deliver optimum quality of service. This is proven by a high system downtime Batswana customers often experience. BTC is a monopoly in providing WAN services. However the problem does not lie only with BTC, companies and government need good network design if they are need increased performance of their networks and maximize use of their bandwidth.