Phil's Blog: Introduction
<< Read it at capafrique.org >>
Published 05 November 2008
For the past 30 months, I’ve been living in the capital of one of the finest countries in Africa: Botswana. Many call Botswana their home: Batswana, the Kalahari Desert and her various dwellers, the Okavango Delta, elephants of Chobe National Park. I am now honoured to be a member of that group.
Botswana is exceptional in many ways. It was never really “colonised” in the strict sense; the chiefs (dikgosi) of the three main chiefdoms went to Queen Victoria in 1895 and asked to be protected from the encroaching Boers and Rhodesians. Botswana has been politically and economically stable since Independence in 1966, and has maintained a growth rate of over 7% every year since. Here, Diamonds actually worked for development.
At Independence, Botswana was listed as one of the 25 poorest countries in the world. Revenue rose from P10m ($1.3m) per annum in 1966 to over P12bn ($1.6bn) per annum today, and no one disputes that diamonds are both the necessary and the sufficient cause of that incline. Diamonds are indeed largely responsible for Botswana’s transformation from an agriculture-based economy to a country consistently growing at one of the fastest rates in the world.
Initiated in 1978, Debswana Diamond Company (Pty) Ltd was structured as a 50/50 partnership between the Government of the Republic of Botswana and De Beers. Debswana remains to this day the country’s largest non-government employer; it produces 70%+ of the country’s exports, 50% of the state’s revenue, and contributes 30% to GDP.
Botswana’s roads, her schools, her socialised healthcare, her progressive HIV/AIDS programmes, her A2 (Moody’s) and A (S&P) best-in-Africa credit ratings – have all been made possible by Debswana revenue. Even Lesedi Motors, the local Land Rover dealership, can thank Debswana for their status as #2 in the world in number of Range Rovers sold. That’s quite a feat for a country of 1.9 million people.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, one of the premier African scholars of our time, writes that aid has failed to raise the standard of living in many parts of Africa, but we should not let that deter us. Rather, “it’s a reason for trying to understand what went wrong and what went right—especially in the places, like Botswana, where aid really helped—and reapplying ourselves to the task.”
A country should not be studied solely in the region of international aid and the results thereof, but in all of the facets of political and social life and culture. The writings to follow will tackle both local issues in an international context, and international issues in a local context: HIV/AIDS programmes and public health generally, educational policies and private-sector initiatives, the arts, tourism, refugees, et cetera. Why and how did so much go right, how translatable is that experience, and what critiques are still in order?
These writings are my attempt to reapply myself to the task.
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