Kabo Ngwanaamotho

It costs just about £40 000 for four years of tuition fees at University of Edinburgh for me. I can buy a house for £40 000 in Botswana…£40 000 is approximately 400 000 Pula! Talk about world apart! £40 000 is how much money was spent in developing this artwork on the left- huh? £40G for that? How exactly was that spent? I wish they had contacted me i would gladly have done it for about 10 quid!

Bob and Edinburgh UNi

So they gave him an honorary degree and now they want it back – big news! who is Bob – Robert Mugabe of course – the University of Edinburgh has decided that because of humanitarian issue they will need to strip the man of the degree.

Alexander McCall Smith
You may know him from The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Collection – See it here , interesting novels known worldwide about Botswana -seriously if you ask anyone abroad if they have ever heard of Botswana and they say yes – it will be because of these novels (and No, not because we are the biggest producers of diamonds). The University of Edinburgh is awarding him an honorary degree in July this year – (a few days after my graduation)

Different note

I am really really angry with the stupid people at the Post Office at Colinton Road in Edinburgh – they made a mistake with my delivery couple of days ago and they have made my stuff delayed and i might miss my flights – to Prague – and i think they were aware of it! Someone help me – i wanna sue them!

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So we have only one power provider in Botswana – government owned utility BPC. And we import more than 70% of our electricity demand from neighboring South Africa. We are part of the South African Power Pool (SAPP), and how good is our power quality, not very good im afraid.

Press Release:Daily News Online,   05 June, 2007,Blackout due to plant failure

GABORONE – Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) chief executive officer, John Kaluzi says the black out on Sunday was a result of the problems encountered on the Matimba Power Station in South Africa.

A statement from the BPC chief says Eskom had requested emergency repairs on the 400kV line from Matimba in South Africa to Phokoje in Selebi Phikwe and it was agreed that the repairs would last from 06:14hrs to 16:00hrs on Sunday.

BPC/Eskom agreed to route power imports from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which are normally destined for South Africa to be routed to Botswana to minimise the need for any load shedding. Read More here

So how does the Power Pool operate in such conditions, isnt it in place to guard against this? Did it fail? I did a short essay on transmission pricing (by the way havent seen result yet!) and it seems prices in the pool have been going up since 2002! Check out the essay here –> Power Systems Engineering with Economics

And last year i was in Botswana for 6 months doing a project at  Jwaneng Mine investigating voltage (power) dips so this ultimately meant i had to investigate power quality from BPC as well.

You can acess the two reports here too

1. Submitted August 2006 –> Power Dips – Phase 1

2. Submitted January 2007 –> Power Dips – Phase 2

Criticism is always welcome (but praise is appreciated more!)