By the end of the 15 minutes or so interview, I’d come to a prophetic conclusion. If all goes according to plan, in a few years, most football fans will probably divide Botswana’s football history into two halves: Before Bennet, and Anno Mamelodini.
These roughly corresponds with the period before April 2024 when Bennet Mamelodi was appointed acting Botswana Football League (BFL) acting CEO and the period after, when he leads the country’s league to the “promised land”, to borrow his phrase.
I hadn’t seen Bennet Mamelodi in about a decade. His life however has been in the headlines for pretty much all those years, so I was convinced that I had his number. Between the glut of back page lead stories and hours spent chit-chatting with sport reporters in the newsroom, I had soaked up a lot of stories about his brutish sabre rattling.
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