Paper short abstract:

I study Botswana’s post-colonial political project. Responding to external, but few domestic, threats this political project simultaneously managed tense geo-political relations and extracted significant tax concessions from De Beers. These dynamics explain both Botswana’s successes and failures.

Paper long abstract:

Much debate has surrounded the categorisation of Botswana’s post-colonial development history and its underlying politics. The contemporary literature is divided, with some presenting Botswana as a growth ‘miracle’, focusing on its high economic growth levels and ‘sound’ macroeconomic management. Critics point to the country’s i) persistently high inequality ii) persistently high unemployment iii) lack of structural transformation and iv) democratic backsliding, all of which are connected to Botswana’s hierarchical and static socio-political order. I contend that this unresolved contradiction exists alongside insufficient exploration of Botswana’s primary historical business-state relationship, with diamond hegemon De Beers, and Botswana’s primary geopolitical relationships, particularly apartheid South Africa. Based on archival work and elite-level interviews, I investigate Botswana’s early post-colonial political project, and provide a coherent political account explaining both Botswana’s successes and failures, while integrating new factors associated with regional white supremacist political projects and South African mining capital. I argue that both sets of Botswana’s outcomes were driven by domestic political elites’, particularly those in the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), post-colonial political project. This project, responding to significant external threats, from white-minority governments, but few domestic threats, arising from relatively weak non-statist groups, co-evolved alongside diamond mining expansion and state-building. This conservative and elite-led political project effectively managed tense geo-political relations and consistently extracted significant concessions from De Beers, particularly surrounding taxation, explaining its macroeconomic success. However, the same qualities explain why Botswana’s post-colonial political project has not brought about a significant reorientation of the country’s hierarchical relations, explaining many of it’s ‘failures’.