A COUNTRY WITH NO COMPASS?

Botswana has plans, strategies, and vision in abundance but lacks the one thing that truly shapes economies: a binding policy. As growth stalls and pressures mount, Douglas Rasbash argues that six critical pillars must move from fragmented ideas into a single, disciplined economic framework. Botswana does not lack plans.

It does not lack visions. It does not lack strategies. What it lacks quietly but profoundly is an economic policy.

This is not semantics. Plans, like national development plans, describe intent, budgets set out resources needed to implement them, but a policy determines behaviour and behaviour is what shapes economies. For decades, Botswana relied on a factor model that worked: resource led growth, fiscal prudence, and state led investment.

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Diamonds financed development. Government allocated capital. Stability built confidence.

But that model is now under strain. Growth is uneven, diversification is limited, and the link between investment and outcomes is weak. Moreover, unemployment is very high, fiscal buffers are diminished and credit rating is tumbling.

Time is running out. Into this space, six powerful ideas emerge: the green economy, decoupling, public sector reform, development policy, public private balance, and regulation. Each is valid.

Each is necessary. But none is embedded in a binding policy framework. They exist as fragments, not as a system.

Start with the green economy. Botswana has committed internationally under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It speaks of sustainability, renewable energy, and resilience.

Yet carbon is not treated as an economic constraint. Investments proceed without rigorous climate screening. Energy markets remain partially defined, particularly around private generation, wheeling, and eMobility.

Our five yearly Nationally Determined Contribution statement to the United Nations that sets out our strategies for mitigation and adaptation is ignored domestically. The result is contradiction: a green narrative without green discipline. A true green economic policy would impose limits.

It would require every major project to quantify emissions, resource use, and climate resilience. It would influence pricing, taxation, and infrastructure decisions. It would turn sustainability from aspiration into obligation.

Closely linked is decoupling, the idea that growth must be separated from resource consumption. This is not environmental idealism, it is economic realism. Botswana’s current growth model remains energy and import intensive.

Transport inefficiencies, spatial sprawl, and rising fuel dependence all point to a system where growth costs too much. While talking about sustainability, Botswana actually consumes more but produces less, its success measured by energy produced, kilometres of roads constructed, numbers of graduates and even by the number of regulations issued rather than what outcomes they achieve. Decoupling changes the metric of success.

It asks not how much we produce, but how efficiently we produce it. It demands that government track energy intensity, water use, and import dependency as core economic indicators. It shifts investment away from expansion toward efficiency.

Without this shift, growth will remain fragile and expensive. From a surfeit of regulations to the third pillar is the public sector, particularly state owned enterprises. Botswana’s SOEs operate without a clear economic doctrine.

They are commercial, strategic, and developmental simultaneously. This ambiguity weakens performance and obscures accountability. A policy framework would define roles.

Some SOEs would compete commercially. Others would deliver essential services under strict cost recovery models. Some might act as temporary catalysts for development.

But all could operate under a single Ministry for state enterprises with clear mandates, measurable targets, and hard budget constraints. Without this, inefficiency becomes systemic, not exceptional. The fourth pillar is development policy, the mechanism that should align capital with outcomes.

Botswana has long pursued diversification and job creation. Yet investment decisions are not consistently tied to measurable results. Large projects proceed without clear evidence of employment impact, export potential, or productivity gains.

Moreover, projects are rarely evaluated after completion to determine whether goals have been met. A genuine development policy would impose discipline. Public funds would be allocated where they generate jobs, expand exports, or increase efficiency.

Private capital would be actively mobilised through structured partnerships. Sector priorities would be explicit. Outcomes would be measured rigorously.

This leads directly to the fifth pillar: public private balance. During its genesis a new nation is inevitably government led. But Botswana’s economy still leans heavily on the state whether through direct investment, SOEs, or policy signalling.

The private sector, while present, is not fully empowered as the primary engine of growth. In one sense the Botswana Economic Transformation Programme is an admission of excessive government, that something very special was needed to unlock the log jams that big government created. A coherent policy would rebalance this relationship.

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