Budget 26: Doing More with Less

Budget 26 must mark a decisive shift toward efficiency, outcomes and economic growth that uses fewer resources, not more. Economic thinking moves in waves. There was a time when growth meant expansion.

More land cultivated. More roads built. More minerals extracted.

More energy consumed. Economist Kenneth Boulding described this era as the cowboy economy, a world of open frontiers where progress simply meant doing more. Botswana’s development story was born in that wave.

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In the early decades of independence, roads, dams, schools, clinics and power stations were precisely what development required. Infrastructure was progress. Spending was growth.

The world has moved on. Resources are constrained. Water is scarce.

Energy is costly. Climate risk is real. Boulding called this the spaceman economy, where success is measured by efficiency, productivity and the ability to separate economic growth from resource consumption.

Here lies the uncomfortable truth. Botswana is still budgeting as if it lives in the cowboy economy. Budget 26 is the moment for the Second Republic to acknowledge that the economic model itself must change.

Last year’s budget named many of the right problems. Unemployment. Gender violence.

Digitisation. Infrastructure. But it defined none of the outcomes.

Twelve months later, basic questions remain unanswered. Did unemployment fall. Did gender violence decline.

Did digitisation improve services. Did energy and water use become more productive. A budget that measures spending rather than results cannot answer these questions.

Budget 26 must mainstream a concept rarely heard in budget speeches. Decoupling. Decoupling means an economy grows without proportional increases in energy use, water use, transport volumes, imports or government size.

It shifts focus from how much is produced to how efficiently it is produced. It is not megawatts generated but energy consumed per unit of GDP. It is not litres of water used but water used per pula of GDP.

It is not kilometres of road built but how efficiently goods and people move. It is not the size of government but the value generated per civil servant.

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