The Myth of Botswana Defying the Resource Curse

When Western academics claim Botswana has defied the infamous “resource curse,” they are only validating the West’s wealth inequality, neocolonialism, and false democratic tendencies.

In traditional Western political science thought, Botswana is often used as the prime example of a developing state that has managed to avoid falling victim to the resource curse. This is to say, rather than succumb to the corruption associated with being a resource-rich nation, as is typically the case with countries that have a surplus of oil and valuable minerals, academics claim that Botswana has established a stable democracy with a peaceful transfer of power between leaders, has invested its surplus revenue into the healthcare and education of its people, and has started diversifying its economy past relying solely on its diamond revenue.

In explaining how Botswana has achieved its miraculous success that has eluded other comparably resource-endowed states, many point to Botswana’s homogeneity, its history of avoiding the most exploitative aspects of European colonization, and its establishment of democratic institutions.

And while it’s true that Botswana today consists almost entirely of Batswana, or people from the Tswana ethnic group, referring to the state as “homogenous” avoids detailing the genocide that has taken place against the country’s indigenous San people. The efforts to ethnically cleanse the San people in Botswana have been taking place for hundreds of years, and continue to take place today as they seek to move the San off of their traditional land in favor of diamond mining exploits.

Likewise, the diamond industry has a stronghold over the political institutions in Botswana, which is not altogether different from the way that the oil industry acts in other developing countries. Amid international outrage over the treatment of the San people in Botswana, the global diamond monopoly De Beers, which has significant investment in potential diamond reserves on land occupied by the San, was able to persuade legislators to ignore San claims to their traditional land on the basis of financing their future campaigns. De Beers’ relationship with the Botswana has been described as a “marriage,” and they have collectively formed a private and public company called Debswana which has massive political sway within the country’s government.

Though Botswana has made a recent effort to diversify its economic output, the vast majority of the Botswanans still work either as miners or in agriculture, which limits the state’s potential for an urban working class. An urban working class is often considered a vital part of a democratic society so that the citizenry can better form trade unions to protect themselves from the greed of business elites. Because the country has never been able to successfully form this urban working class, the country has poor political participation as a whole, leaving its claim to democracy more indefinite.

These faults in Botswana’s democracy do not make the country more corrupt or less stable than its neighbors or states with comparable Human Development Index (HDI). Rather, I bring up these critiques of Botswana’s government to critique the typical analysis of the state’s government.

Academics and policy analysts believe Botswana to be a miraculous democracy that defies the resource curse because it allows them to ignore their own developed countries’ breaks with democracy. It is no secret that countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia, typically viewed as bastions of free market democracy, have long, highly-publicized histories of abusing indigenous peoples and enabling monopolies to have significant levels of power in their respective governments. Thus, when Western theorists designate Botswana as a uniquely constructed, resource-rich, developing state, they are erasing their host countries’ own undemocratic tendencies.

In order to maintain any level of accountability for the Global North’s own role in restricting representative government, whether it be in their own countries or in the Global South, it is important that thought leaders in Western political science and international relations are honest about their own states’ “democracies.”