By Ephraim Agbo
The End of an Illusion
For decades, Botswana was celebrated as Africa’s “shining exception” — a country that turned diamonds into stability, growth, and global respect. But the world that once rewarded such a model is fading fast. The old equilibrium — diamonds for stability, De Beers for partnership, and fiscal prudence for praise — is breaking down.
Enter Duma Boko, whose plan is as radical as it is risky:
Increase state control over the diamond sector, drive diversification into new minerals and industries, and build leverage through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to secure better deals for Botswana. It’s not just a development plan — it’s a challenge to the structure of dependency itself.
But can Botswana remake itself without collapsing under the weight of the very system it seeks to reform?
Structural Dependency: Diamonds as the Single Story
Since independence, Botswana’s economy has revolved around a singular resource logic — diamonds. Through the Debswana joint venture, the state and De Beers shared control over production and sales, channeling revenues into public investment. For decades, it worked.
But that success came with a silent cost: structural dependency.
When Debswana cut production in 2024 due to weakening global demand, Botswana’s fiscal exposure became painfully visible. Even worse, the global diamond industry is undergoing technological disruption — lab-grown diamonds (LGDs) are now not only cheaper but increasingly accepted by consumers.
This is not a cyclical shock. It’s a structural inversion of value. The core of Botswana’s economy — its comparative advantage — is eroding.
The implication is profound: Botswana is still rich, but less relevant. And that realization sits at the heart of Boko’s political project.
Political Economy: Between Sovereignty and Credibility
Boko’s proposal for increased state control over the diamond sector is not simply nationalist rhetoric; it’s a sovereignty claim. He is arguing that Botswana must own its future value chains — not just extract rocks for others to polish.
However, history offers caution. Across Africa, state control often morphs into state capture. Ownership without accountability easily becomes a new form of elite rent-seeking. The risk is that “public control” becomes private gain under political cover.
Yet, the opposite — overreliance on foreign corporations — leaves the nation externally dependent and fiscally vulnerable.
Boko’s challenge is therefore not ideological but institutional:
Can he design transparent, rule-bound state participation that extracts value without undermining investor confidence?
That will require:
- Open-contracting laws for all mineral deals.
- Independent audits of state-owned enterprises.
- A clear fiscal rule tying diamond revenues to long-term stabilization rather than recurrent spending.
- A publicly disclosed sovereign wealth fund that is insulated from political cycles.
Only such architecture can transform national control from populist rhetoric into sustainable economic strategy.
Industrial Transition: From Extraction to Transformation
Every African leader speaks of “diversification”, but few achieve it. Boko’s focus on critical minerals, digital services, and industrial beneficiation represents an attempt to move Botswana from extractive dependency to productive complexity.
But beneficiation has historically failed across the continent for three key reasons:
- Lack of power infrastructure — processing minerals domestically is energy-intensive.
- Weak industrial ecosystems — no reliable supply chains or skilled labor.
- Policy inconsistency — sudden tax changes and unclear ownership rules deter investors.
Botswana can break this pattern only if it treats industrialization as a governance project, not an engineering one.
The test case will be whether the government can build anchor processing clusters for copper, nickel, or battery minerals with genuine private–public risk-sharing, not rent-sharing.
If successful, this will mark a pivot from being a price taker in the global value chain to a price maker in regional production networks.
Regional Leverage: The AfCFTA and Africa’s Bargaining Power
The AfCFTA is more than a trade pact; it’s a geopolitical strategy. Boko sees it as a way to aggregate African production capacity and negotiate from strength.
By linking Botswana’s minerals, agriculture, and manufacturing to broader Southern African supply chains, the country could build scale and reduce dependency on Western buyers.
However, integration on paper often collapses in practice. Tariff harmonization is the easy part; logistics, infrastructure, and trust are harder.
Botswana will have to pioneer corridor-based integration — focusing on a few high-value regional chains rather than continental ambition. For example:
- A Southern African Mineral Processing Corridor connecting Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa.
- An Agro-processing hub tied to cross-border cold chains and logistics.
If these corridors succeed, Botswana could shift from a landlocked to a region-locked advantage — a small state embedded in a larger economic logic.
5. External Pressures: Trade, Migration, and Conditionality
Beyond economics, Boko faces a new layer of geopolitical constraint.
- AGOA (the African Growth and Opportunity Act) is under renegotiation, reshaping Africa’s export advantage to the U.S.
- The U.S. and EU increasingly link aid, trade, and migration policies, as seen in the controversial “third-country” deportation agreements involving African states like Eswatini.
This global politics of conditionality means Botswana’s domestic choices — from who it trades with to who it shelters — are now under external surveillance.
For a small democracy like Botswana, the question is:
How do you maintain moral sovereignty when your economy depends on external preferences?
Boko’s answer appears to be diversification of diplomacy — balancing Western partners with new coalitions through AfCFTA, Asia, and possibly BRICS-aligned states. The risk, however, is geopolitical overstretch — courting everyone but committing to none.
6. Institutional Scaffolding: The Real Test
The sustainability of Boko’s vision depends not on ambition, but on institutional scaffolding — the hard, often invisible architecture of rules, checks, and capacities.
This scaffolding includes:
- A credible public investment management framework.
- A merit-based civil service shielded from political turnover.
- A regulatory state that enforces contracts and environmental standards.
- A citizen oversight mechanism for natural resource governance.
Without this, reforms will be swallowed by what economists call “high-level patterns of extractive continuity” — where new elites replicate old dependencies under reformist branding.
7. A Future in Three Scenarios
| Scenario | Outcome | Risk/Reward |
|---|---|---|
| Strategic Transformation | Botswana achieves controlled expansion of state equity, launches mineral processing clusters, and builds AfCFTA-backed corridors. | High reward — long-term sovereignty. |
| Reform Fatigue | Partial progress; fiscal stress forces compromise with old partners. | Medium — structural vulnerability persists. |
| Populist Collapse | Political capture, investor flight, failed projects. | High risk — reversal of Botswana’s credibility. |
Conclusion — From Resource Wealth to Political Wisdom
Duma Boko’s agenda is not simply economic; it’s civilizational — a statement that Africa’s resource states can transition from raw extraction to strategic ownership.
But rhetoric is easier than redesign. The world no longer rewards moral arguments about sovereignty; it rewards competence, transparency, and credibility.
Botswana’s challenge is to reimagine itself — not as a “diamond country” but as a governance country.
If Boko can institutionalize that shift, he won’t just rewrite Botswana’s story; he’ll redraw the map of how small African nations bargain with the world.
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