The Court of Appeal decided that the Ba-Ga-Malete Tribe were indeed the rightful owners of Forest Hill Farm and that the High Court was correct in finding that the land registration scheme that allowed for the compulsory acquisition of the Tribe’s Farm violated the right to property enshrined under Section 8 of the Constitution. The Court of Appeal also found that the High Court was correct when it decided that the amendment to Section 7 of the Tribal Territories Act of 1973 amounted to an unconstitutional deprivation of property and should be struck off.
The Botswana Court of Appeal will hand down a judgment in an appeal brought by the Botswana government (Appellants) against the judgment and order of the full bench of the High Court delivered on 21 May 2022. The High Court in its judgment ruled that the Ba-Gamalete Tribe (Respondent) were not only the rightful owners of Forest Hill farm but also that the acquisition of their farm by the government amounted to an unconstitutional deprivation of property. The High Court noted that the government, and specifically the Malete Land Board, did not attempt to follow the Constitution or the Acquisition of Property Act when it tried to obtain the Tribe’s title deed land.
As you can tell, that is a news bulletin from the future, a future that has been proposed by the Report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the
Diamonds are of course Botswana’s God-given bequest, but the Botswana government did two things very early on that set the foundations for perhaps one of the