About The Ngami Times

The Ngami Times

The Ngami Times is an English-language weekly tabloid newspaper published in Maun, in Botswana's North-West District. It appears every Friday and serves Ngamiland and the wider north-west of the country, including the Chobe District. Founded in 1999, it is owned by The Ngami Times Printing and Publishing Company (Pty) Ltd and is privately owned and financed. In a Botswana press otherwise concentrated in the capital, Gaborone, the paper is unusual for being based in Maun, the tourist town that serves as the gateway to the Okavango Delta. It presents itself as the leading advertising medium for the North West and Chobe districts, and its journalism covers local and community news, council affairs, tourism and travel, business and sport. Its history includes two of the best-documented press-freedom episodes in Botswana's post-independence media record: the expulsion of its news editor in 2005 and a sustained confrontation with the North West District Council in 2006.

History and founding

Company profiles date the founding of The Ngami Times to 1999. The paper was established in Maun at the end of a decade in which Botswana's private press was still overwhelmingly a Gaborone phenomenon, with national titles produced in the capital and distributed outward to the rest of the country. A weekly newspaper rooted in Maun itself was a different proposition: it could report district affairs from inside the community it served, rather than through correspondents filing to a distant newsroom. The paper has continued as a weekly ever since. It was listed among Botswana's private weekly newspapers in the African Media Barometer for Botswana in 2014, alongside titles such as the Botswana Gazette, the Botswana Guardian, the Midweek Sun, Sunday Standard and The Voice, and references to it as Maun's and Ngamiland's weekly newspaper appear in standard reference works, including the external references attached to Maun and the Okavango Delta. Evidence of its continuing publication extends into the present decade: an online edition of the paper was still publishing original local reporting in August 2025.

Ownership and business model

The Ngami Times is owned by The Ngami Times Printing and Publishing Company (Pty) Ltd, and company profiles describe the business as privately owned and privately financed. That places it within Botswana's commercial private press, distinct from the state-owned Daily News, which is distributed free of charge and which academic studies say distorts the newspaper market for paying titles. Like other small private weeklies in Botswana, The Ngami Times depends on a combination of copy sales and advertising. Its own positioning emphasises the advertising side of that model: it describes itself as the leading advertising medium in the North West and Chobe districts, a claim directed at the local businesses, tourism operators and organisations of the region for whom a Maun-based weekly offers access to readers that Gaborone-based national papers reach less directly. In a small advertising market, that regional niche — a defined territory, a loyal local readership and a weekly rhythm matched to it — is the paper's commercial foundation.

Maun, Ngamiland and the Okavango setting

Maun is the principal town of Ngamiland, in Botswana's North-West District, and the tourism gateway to the Okavango Delta, one of Africa's most famous wildlife areas. The African Media Development Initiative's Botswana research described Maun simply as a tourist town, and that economy shapes the community The Ngami Times serves: safari operators and lodges, the wildlife and conservation sector, district administration, and the residents of Maun and the surrounding villages whose lives are governed by the rhythms of tourism, water, grazing and wildlife. A newspaper in Maun therefore reports on an unusually distinctive local agenda, in which council services and roads sit alongside conservation decisions, human-wildlife conflict and the fortunes of the safari industry. Being produced in the town, rather than in Gaborone hundreds of kilometres away, gives the paper direct access to that agenda and to the officials, businesses and residents who feature in it.

Editorial coverage and readership

The paper's stated coverage spans news, travel and tourism, sport and business, delivered for the community of the north-west. In practice, its documented reporting shows a strong emphasis on local accountability and community affairs: North West District Council business, resident relocations, roads and municipal services, crime and public health, and wildlife matters affecting local livelihoods. Its managing editor in the 2000s, Norman Chandler, described the paper as having been at the forefront of campaigns for street lights, an end to a local crime wave, tarred roads, the abolition of litter and new sewerage lines in Maun, and as having backed the council's efforts to improve the town — a self-description that presents The Ngami Times as a civic campaigner for its town as well as a reporter of it. The paper also maintained youth-focused columns during the years when HIV/AIDS was Botswana's dominant public-health emergency, even though, as Chandler explained at the time, giving front-page prominence to HIV stories had cost the paper sales.

Place in Botswana's newspaper landscape

Media-development research singles out The Ngami Times for its geography. The African Media Development Initiative's Botswana report noted that, except for the Ngami Times in Maun, Botswana had few local and no regional newspapers, and discussions of the country's media landscape in the same period described it as one of a small number of community newspapers in a system dominated by national titles and state broadcasting. Academic analysis reaches a similar conclusion from a different direction. Richard Rooney's content analysis of the Botswana press, published in the Global Media Journal in 2012, placed The Ngami Times in the midmarket group of Botswana weeklies — titles, all tabloid in size, that mix serious public-interest material with more accessible content aimed at a moderately educated readership — and included it among the privately owned weekly newspapers that made up most of the country's press. Later academic work on Botswana newspapers followed Rooney's categorisation and continued to list The Ngami Times among the country's weekly titles. For researchers, the paper is therefore evidence that Botswana's print pluralism, while real, has been largely a capital-city phenomenon with very few exceptions — of which this Maun weekly is the standard example.

Norman Chandler and the newsroom

The public face of The Ngami Times in its best-documented period was Norman Chandler, who appears in the record variously as the paper's managing editor, its editor and its publisher. Chandler spoke for the newspaper in each of its major confrontations with authority, dealing with the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Botswana chapter, national media and international press-freedom organisations. His recorded comments give a consistent picture of the paper's editorial stance: that reporting the views of residents, even when those views discomfort officials, is the proper work of a local newspaper, and that the paper supported development in Maun while refusing to limit itself to positive coverage. The paper also formed part of the working lives of journalists who went on to wider careers. The British journalist and producer Will Wintercross, later a correspondent for PBS NewsHour, CNN and The Telegraph, began his career in 2001, aged 19, reporting for The Ngami Times in Maun — an indication of the paper's role as a training ground operating far from the country's main newsrooms.

The expulsion of Rodrick Mukumbira in 2005

In 2005 The Ngami Times became the centre of an international press-freedom case. Rodrick Mukumbira, a Zimbabwean national who had worked in Botswana since 2002, was the paper's news editor and also a correspondent for Agence France-Presse and for IRIN, the United Nations-affiliated news service. On 27 July 2005 he received a letter from the Ministry of Labour and Home Affairs cancelling his work and residence permits — which were not due to expire until October 2007 — and ordering him to surrender them and leave the country within seven days. No reasons were given. The government acted under Section 22(1) of the Immigration Act and Section 8(1) of the Employment of Non-Citizens Act, provisions that allowed permits to be cancelled on the stated ground that a holder's presence was no longer in the interests of Botswana. Mukumbira left Botswana with his family on 2 August 2005 and lodged an appeal. He told the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) that he believed the expulsion was connected to his journalism, possibly including his reporting on the government's eviction of San people from their ancestral homeland in the Kalahari. Chandler said the paper was mystified by the action and that Mukumbira had been a valued, law-abiding member of staff. MISA Botswana condemned the move, the opposition Botswana Congress Party called it inconsistent with modern democratic practices, and the CPJ wrote in protest to the Botswana government. The expulsion, which came in the same period as the forced departure of Australian academic Kenneth Good after his criticism of government policy, was subsequently cited in MISA's regional reporting as a marker of declining press freedom in Botswana.

The North West District Council dispute in 2006

The following year brought a prolonged local confrontation. At a World Press Freedom Day commemoration in Maun on 6 May 2006, Paulos Nkoni, secretary of the North West District Council, announced that he intended to ban The Ngami Times from reporting on council affairs, saying he was under pressure from councillors and staff who accused the paper of causing conflict. Holding up a copy of the newspaper, Nkoni objected in particular to its coverage of the relocation of residents from the run-down Mabudutsa ward to Matshwane, about 10 kilometres away, which he said was not positive. Chandler replied that the paper could not be accused of negativity for reporting the views of residents angered by the relocation, and warned that if the paper were banned for its reporting, transparency, press freedom and the right of people to voice their views would be doomed in Ngamiland and throughout Botswana. MISA-Botswana condemned the council secretary's attitude and called on the responsible minister to act. The dispute escalated in September 2006, when Nkoni threatened to sue the paper for defamation over an article headlined "Row over new road", published in its 25 August to 1 September 2006 issue, demanding a front-page retraction and unconditional apology within seven days. Chandler refused to apologise, saying Nkoni owed the media an apology, and MISA-Botswana condemned the threat as a serious attack on media freedom, insisting that public office-holders are servants of the people rather than, in its phrase, sacred cows.

Health, wildlife and community reporting

Beyond its press-freedom history, the paper's documented reporting reflects the concerns of the region it serves. In the early 2000s, when Botswana was mounting one of Africa's most extensive public responses to HIV/AIDS, Chandler spoke publicly about the difficulty of sustaining reader interest in the epidemic: the paper had repeatedly given HIV stories front-page status despite suffering in sales as a result, and it continued to run columns dedicated to young people even though he believed they were widely ignored. That candour, recorded in international reporting on Botswana's AIDS response, is a rare first-person account of the commercial pressures on a small African weekly attempting public-health journalism. Wildlife and conservation — central to Ngamiland's economy and daily life — are the other recurring theme. The paper's online edition in August 2025, for example, carried detailed reporting on the involvement of public servants in poaching in Ngamiland, including arrests of Department of Water and Sanitation employees in Maun and official concern at the District Commissioner level: the kind of locally sourced environmental reporting that a district-based newsroom is positioned to produce and that national outlets rarely match at that level of detail.

Digital presence and current status

The Ngami Times maintains an online presence under the title The Ngami Times Online, through which its reporting continues to circulate; its August 2025 poaching investigation, for instance, was published online under a named staff byline. Company profiles list the domain ngamitimes.co.bw as the newspaper's website, and independent technology profiles confirm that the domain is a live, configured site. The paper is also still catalogued in international newspaper directories as an English-language Botswana title. Taken together, the record shows a small, privately owned regional weekly that has sustained publication from its 1999 founding through to the present — surviving the loss of its news editor to expulsion, a council ban threat and a defamation threat along the way — and that remains the reference example of a Botswana newspaper rooted outside the capital, serving the Okavango gateway town of Maun and the districts of the north-west.