When a billionaire walks through the door, a country has two choices: roll out the red carpet, or roll up its sleeves. For Botswana, the visitor was Mohammed Dewji, Tanzania’s richest man and one of Africa’s most relentless empire builders.
The opportunity he dangling – manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, energy – reads like a wish list for a nation hungry to diversify beyond diamonds. The catch? Botswana’s own government concedes it can be its own worst enemy.
Dewji, who oversees the sprawling MeTL Group from Dar es Salaam, sat down with President Duma Boko on Tuesday to map out what a partnership might look like. His pitch was not that Botswana’s 2.4 million people represent a vast consumer market; they don’t. It was something more ambitious: that this stable, landlocked nation could serve as a strategic springboard into the entire southern African economy, a base camp from which his conglomerate could reach 350 million consumers across the region.
“Botswana, with a small population, should join hands with strategic investors to invest in the continent,” Dewji told the president.
It was the kind of line that sounds simple but carries weight, a quiet challenge wrapped in diplomatic courtesy.
A conglomerate with reach
MeTL is not a household name outside East Africa, but its footprint is staggering. Founded by Dewji’s father in the 1970s, the group has metastasized across 48 manufacturing sectors; textiles, agriculture, logistics, distribution, natural resources; with broader tentacles in energy, petroleum, insurance, telecommunications, property, mining, and food and beverages. It is Tanzania’s second-largest employer after the government. Forbes puts Dewji’s net worth at roughly $2.1 billion.
In other words, this is not a prospect kicking tires. MeTL has the capital, the supply chains and the commercial networks to actually build something – if the host country can keep pace.
The geography play
Dewji’s interest fits a broader pattern taking hold across the continent. African companies, once content to dominate their home markets, are increasingly looking outward – seeking footholds in countries that offer access to regional trade blocs. The logic is compelling: under the African Continental Free Trade Area, or AfCFTA, a factory in Botswana can theoretically ship goods tariff-free across 54 nations. Membership in the Southern African Development Community and the Southern African Customs Union adds further reach.
The numbers underscore the shift. African investors accounted for 20 percent of international projects in services and manufacturing across the continent in 2023, according to UNCTAD, the United Nations trade body. And Africa attracted a record $97 billion in foreign direct investment last year; a sign that global and regional capital is increasingly finding the continent’s potential too large to ignore.
Botswana’s proposition is clear: come for the stability, stay for the market access. But UNCTAD’s research also carries a warning; geography is a starting point, not a destination. Efficient infrastructure, streamlined customs, sound regulation and investment-friendly processes are what turn a strategic location into a thriving one.
The bureaucracy problem
President Boko, to his credit, did not pretend otherwise.
He acknowledged that government procedures can be sluggish, that investors sometimes find themselves shuffling between offices, that the machinery of the state does not always move at the speed of commerce. He pledged to fix it; streamlining processes, imposing clear timelines, cutting the red tape that has long tested the patience of investors drawn to Botswana’s stability but frustrated by its pace.
“Government processes can sometimes be slow,” Boko conceded, in a frankness that is refreshing in African governance circles; and that also underscores the scale of the challenge.
The stakes are real. Dewji’s portfolio aligns almost precisely with Botswana’s economic diversification priorities: agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, energy, mining, food production. If MeTL commits capital, it would bring more than money – it would bring supply-chain expertise, regional market access and the kind of large-scale employment that Botswana’s young population desperately needs.
But Tuesday’s meeting produced no signed deals, no dollar figures, no timelines, no memoranda of understanding. It was a courtship, not a wedding.
The test ahead
And so Botswana arrives at a familiar crossroads, the kind that separates promising economies from transformative ones. The country has long sold itself on political stability and the rule of law; and deservedly so. But stability, by itself, does not build factories or fill shipping containers. Investors like Dewji need speed, predictability and infrastructure that matches the ambition.
The real question is not whether Botswana can attract interest from Africa’s business elite, it just did. The question is whether it can convert that interest into steel in the ground, payrolls on the books and goods crossing borders. The president has identified the problem. A billionaire has signaled his willingness. What happens next will say more about Botswana than any investment brochure ever could.