At the launch of the WeekendPost’s Diamond Jubilee publication, Dr Gloria Somolekae argued that Botswana’s experts saw the warning signs decades ago – and that the task now is to act on them.
Botswana’s extraordinary diamond fortune has long been held up as a model of how a resource can lift a nation. But at the launch of the WeekendPost’s Diamond Jubilee publication this week, one of the country’s most authoritative voices on development policy delivered a more sobering message: the lessons were there to be learned decades ago, and the task now is to act on them.
Dr Gloria Somolekae, Executive Director of the Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis (BIDPA), told an audience at the Travel Lodge in Gaborone that the country’s experience with diamonds offered a clear and uncomfortable lesson for those who govern it: expert advice and research must not only be produced, but heeded.
Botswana had been warned, she said, long before the current pressures on the economy began to bite. The risks of leaning too heavily on a single mineral, and the urgent need to diversify, were flagged years in advance – including by her own institution.
Speaking at the event, titled “Botswana Beyond 60: Champions of a $40 Billion Future,” Dr Somolekae recalled that BIDPA had, years ago, highlighted the need to prepare for a future in which diamonds would no longer provide the same economic cushion. The warning, she said, underscored a principle that has become ever more pressing: the value of making timely policy decisions, rather than scrambling to respond only once a crisis has already arrived.
It was a theme – foresight ignored -that ran through much of her presentation.
A knowledge economy deferred
Nowhere was that pattern more visible, Dr Somolekae suggested, than in Botswana’s long and unfinished pursuit of a knowledge-based economy.
The country recognised as far back as the 1990s that its diamond-led, capital-intensive model would never generate enough jobs to defeat poverty or spread opportunity broadly, she said. Mining produced spectacular growth, but by its very nature it employed relatively few people.
“The capital-intensive nature of mining meant that while diamonds generated significant economic growth, the sector could not create the volume of jobs needed to transform livelihoods across the country,” she explained.
That realisation, she said, pushed the government toward a more deliberate shift into science, technology and a knowledge-driven future. During National Development Plan 7, covering 1991/92 to 1996/97, the state sought to respond by investing in science and in the engineers and technical skills a modern economy would demand. BIDPA itself, established in 1995, cut its teeth on early research into poverty and rural development to support that policy agenda.
The ambition, Dr Somolekae said, was expansive: an economy capable of developing new products, generating jobs, nurturing new businesses, driving value addition and mineral beneficiation, and embracing new technologies. Over successive development plans, a scaffolding of institutions rose to serve that vision – the Botswana Innovation Hub, BITRI, the Botswana International University of Science and Technology, the Botswana Innovation Fund and SmartBots among them.
And yet, she conceded, Botswana ultimately fell behind – even though it had been among the early adopters of science and technology policy on the continent.
Her diagnosis was pointed. The country, she said, had lacked a clear strategy for turning its knowledge-economy ambition into reality, pursuing the agenda in fragments rather than anchoring it in a single, comprehensive plan. The institutions were built; the connective strategy was not.
Poverty that the numbers obscure
If the knowledge economy represents an opportunity half-seized, poverty, in Dr Somolekae’s telling, remains Botswana’s most stubborn challenge – one that decades of programmes have narrowed but not closed.
The national poverty figure, she cautioned, does not fully capture the disparities felt in parts of the country. In some communities, particularly in rural areas where economic opportunities are scarce, poverty can run significantly higher than the headline number suggests, deepening reliance on social protection.
That scarcity has consequences beyond household income. The absence of opportunity, she said, has fuelled rural-to-urban migration, drawing people toward Gaborone and Francistown in search of a living – only for many to confront hard conditions on the fringes of those cities.
Dr Somolekae pointed to multidimensional poverty research conducted in 2023 as evidence that deprivation extends well beyond earnings. Access to basic services and the broader conditions of daily life, she said, shape people’s experience of poverty as much as the money in their pockets.
A further concern, she noted, is that some of those who should qualify for assistance are still slipping through the net of existing programmes. In response, the government has established a National Social Protection Task Team to review current schemes, sharpen their targeting and widen coverage so that help reaches those who genuinely need it.
But social protection alone, she argued, is not an answer. Lifting people out of poverty will ultimately require sustainable economic opportunities – above all in the rural areas where the gap is widest.
Much to celebrate
For all the candour of her assessment, Dr Somolekae was careful to frame Botswana’s sixtieth year as an occasion for genuine pride – nowhere more so than in the country’s record of peace and political stability.
She singled out the peaceful transition of power that followed the 2024 general elections, when the government changed hands without violence and without, as she put it, people going missing.
“We have a lot to celebrate,” she said. “We live in a peaceful country, and as a diamond-producing country, that is not the case everywhere. We had a peaceful change of government in 2024.”
It was a reminder, delivered to a room marking six decades of nationhood, that the record Botswana has built is both an achievement to be honoured and a foundation on which the harder work – of diversification, of a true knowledge economy, of poverty finally overcome — still waits to be done.
