An evidence-based review of Botswana’s high-income, jobs, and diversification agenda
The 2025 State of the Nation Address (SONA), the first by the UDC government, presents a grand narrative of renewal — a bold manifesto for hope and transformation. But beneath its inspiring tone lies a gap between ambition and arithmetic. The speech is long on aspiration and light on evidence, calling for a high-income, job-rich economy without showing the numbers to get there.
A Vision Without Arithmetic
The SONA promises nothing less than a high-income, digitally enabled, export-driven Botswana by 2036; half a million jobs; and an economy no longer dependent on diamonds. It is an exhilarating vision. But through an economist’s lens, the arithmetic underpinning these ambitions is missing. The government’s task is not to curb ambition but to ground it in measurable, sequenced, and affordable plans.
The High-Income Horizon
The SONA’s central promise — a per capita income of P200,000 (≈ USD 14,500) by 2036 — would push Botswana across the World Bank’s high-income threshold of USD 13,935. To achieve that, nominal per-capita income must rise by 5.5–7.5 percent per year for more than a decade, implying real GDP growth of about 5 percent annually given population growth of 1.6 percent. Apart from being in a protracted recession, Botswana has not sustained that rate since 2007. The address acknowledges structural vulnerabilities — dependence on diamonds, fiscal strain, and weak productivity — but offers no quantitative growth path or sectoral projections. It cites progress on the Botswana Economic Transformation Programme (BETP), NDP 12, and the Sovereign Wealth Fund but omits targets for capital formation, productivity gains, or export value addition.
Fiscal Strain and Generosity
Fiscal choices compound the gap between aspiration and feasibility. Botswana’s credit rating is moving in the wrong direction, as are foreign direct investments and the value of the currency. Despite this, government has announced generous welfare expansions — a 68 percent increase in pensions, a five-fold rise in student allowances, and debt and tariff relief measures. These enhance household welfare but swell recurrent spending at a time when “our fiscus is under tremendous strain.” Without parallel growth in private investment and productivity, consumption will rise faster than output.
Unrealistic Growth Engines
The SONA promises new engines — uranium, manganese, iron ore, renewable power, and the Mercantile Exchange — yet their combined output remains dwarfed by diamonds, which account for roughly one-third of GDP and 80 percent of exports. High-income status requires a productivity revolution, not a mining reshuffle. Botswana needs more capital per worker, faster technology adoption, and structural reforms that increase total factor productivity. Without that, the 2036 milestone remains rhetorical.
Jobs Without Numbers
Employment creation is rightly identified as the national emergency. With 38 percent youth unemployment, the SONA’s pledge to create 512,000 jobs through nine sectoral programmes is the speech’s moral centrepiece. Yet again, the quantitative backbone is absent — no timeline, sectoral distribution, or fiscal costing accompanies the figure. The proposed job sources — agriculture, tourism, digital services, energy, construction, and mining beneficiation — are uneven in labour absorption. Capital-intensive sectors such as energy and mining will raise output but generate few direct jobs. By contrast, agriculture and small-scale services offer employment potential but face systemic bottlenecks: insecure land tenure, water scarcity, limited credit, and poor market access.
The Productivity Challenge
The SONA’s pledge to raise agriculture’s share of GDP from 2 to 6 percent is ambitious. To achieve it would require tripling productivity and doubling investment in irrigation, mechanisation, and agro-processing. Youth-targeted initiatives — the Presidential Youth Empowerment Campaign, Digital Content Hub, and Textile Acceleration Programme — embody the right instincts but remain small in scale. Even the much-touted CCI Global BPO project, with 3,000 new jobs, barely dents a labour force exceeding one million. The public sector continues to carry disproportionate responsibility for employment through Ipelegeng, expanded social programmes, and subsidised training schemes. These create temporary relief but not sustainable work. The challenge is to shift from welfare employment to productive employment — jobs that generate value rather than absorb budget.
Diversification or Reconfiguration?
Diversification has been Botswana’s stated goal for forty years, and SONA 2025 restates it with flourish. Yet most of the substance still revolves around the traditional triad of mining, tourism, and agriculture. The speech celebrates the new De Beers–ODC agreement, contemplates acquiring Anglo American’s stake in De Beers, and extends Debswana’s licences to 2054 — reaffirming diamonds as the gravitational centre of national strategy. The diversification narrative broadens to “new minerals” — uranium, manganese, and iron ore — but this is horizontal diversification within mining, not vertical diversification into manufacturing or knowledge sectors. Similarly, the 1,500 MW energy expansion (900 MW solar, 600 MW thermal) strengthens security of supply but does not itself diversify the economy; it merely powers it.
Cattle, Culture, and Constraints
The cultural attraction to cattle still pervades more than its economic and environmental significance. Increasing the herd size to five million requires decent land, new abattoirs, and veterinary support that barely exists. Trebling the national herd is not diversification but more of the same. The truly novel frontiers — digital services, green finance, and creative industries — are treated almost as footnotes. Tourism, sports, and arts are invoked as new pillars, yet outside the P200 million creative-fund initiative, no structural investment framework is announced. Manufacturing — the missing link between agriculture and trade — is barely mentioned.
Between Poetry and Policy
There is no denying that SONA 2025 restores moral clarity and optimism. It speaks of dignity, equity, and opportunity, reaffirming social cohesion after years of stagnation. Its tone is confident and inclusive, and for that it deserves credit. But economic development is not poetry; it is policy, and policy requires arithmetic. To make the leap from aspiration to achievement, Botswana needs a new generation of metrics: sectoral growth targets, investment ratios, fiscal ceilings, employment multipliers, and productivity indicators. Implementation will determine everything.
Surreality on Steroids
In the final analysis, SONA 2025 is an eloquent statement of ambition without arithmetic. It calls for transformation but remains anchored in familiar sectors. It promises jobs but leaves the employment engine undefined. It seeks high-income status but sidesteps the quantitative scaffolding needed to reach it. At moments, it reads like surreality on steroids — a nation dreaming in headlines while the spreadsheet stays blank. Botswana’s challenge is no longer to imagine the future; it is to cost it, schedule it, and deliver it. The next chapter must turn every promise into a number, every ambition into a programme, and every speech into measurable progress.