I have written something before about, 'Why Nations Fail,’ an excellent book by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. This is another excerpt, this time they try apply their ideas to explain Botswana's success. The story of successful management of natural resources in Botswana is well-known, the question is why did it take place here, but not in, say, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe?
A few short excerpts below summarise their argument:
"Early stages of independence would play out very differently in
Botswana, again largely because of the background created by Tswana
historical institutions. In this, Botswana exhibited many parallels
to England on the verge of the Glorious Revolution. England had
achieved rapid political centralization under the Tudors and had the
Magna Carta and the tradition of Parliament that could at least
aspire to constrain monarchs and ensure some degree of pluralism.
Botswana also had some amount of state centralization and relatively
pluralistic tribal institutions that survived colonialism…..
…..At
independence the Tswana emerged with a history of institutions
enshrining limited chieftaincy and some degree of accountability of
chiefs to the people. The Tswana were of course not unique in Africa
for having institutions like this, but they were unique in the extent
to which these institutions survived the colonial period unscathed…..
….The first big
diamond discovery was under Ngwato land, Seretse Khama’s
traditional homeland. Before the discovery was announced, Khama
instigated a change in the law so that all subsoil mineral rights
were vested in the nation, not the tribe. This ensured that diamond
wealth would not create great inequities in Botswana…..
…...Another
facet of political centralization was the effort to unify the country
further, for example, with legislation ensuring that only Setswana
and English were to be taught in school. Today Botswana looks like a
homogenous country, without the ethnic and linguistic fragmentation
associated with many other African nations. But this was an outcome
of the policy to have only English and a single national language,
Setswana, taught in schools to minimize conflict between different
tribes and groups within society. The last census to ask questions
about ethnicity was the one taken in 1946, which revealed
considerable heterogeneity in Botswana.
….Botswana
broke the mold because it was able to seize a critical juncture,
postcolonial independence, and set up inclusive institutions. The
Botswana Democratic Party and the traditional elites, including Khama
himself, did not try to form a dictatorial regime or set up
extractive institutions that might have enriched them at the expense
of society. This was once again an outcome of the interplay between a
critical juncture and existing institutions."
I have reproduced the chapter in full below. Its a fascinating book that I would recommend to anyone interested in understanding this question.
ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1895, the ocean liner Tantallon Castle docked at
Plymouth on the southern coast of England. Three African chiefs,
Khama of the Ngwato, Bathoen of the Ngwaketse, and Sebele of the
Kwena, disembarked and took the 8:10 express train to Paddington
Station, London. The three chiefs had come to Britain on a mission:
to save their and five other Tswana states from Cecil Rhodes. The
Ngwato, Ngwaketse, and Kwena were three of the eight Tswana states
comprising what was then known as Bechuanaland, which would become
Botswana after independence in 1966.
The tribes had
been trading with Europeans for most of the nineteenth century. In
the 1840s, the famous Scottish missionary David Livingstone had
traveled extensively in Bechuanaland and converted King Sechele of
the Kwena to Christianity. The first translation of the Bible into an
African language was in Setswana, the language of the Tswana. In 1885
Britain had declared Bechuanaland a protectorate. The Tswana were
content with the arrangement, as they thought this would bring them
protection from further European invasions, particularly from the
Boers, with whom they had been clashing since the Great Trek in 1835,
a migration of thousands of Boers into the interior to escape from
British colonialism. The British, on the other hand, wanted control
of the area to block both further expansions by the Boers (this
page–this page) and possible expansions by Germans, who had annexed
the area of southwest Africa corresponding to today’s Namibia. The
British did not think that a full-scale colonization was worthwhile.
The high commissioner Rey summarized the attitudes of the British
government in 1885 clearly: “We have no interest in the country to
the north of the Molope [the Bechuanaland protectorate], except as a
road to the interior; we might therefore confine ourselves for the
present to preventing that part of the Protectorate being occupied by
either filibusters or foreign powers doing as little in the way of
administration or settlement as possible.”
But things
changed for the Tswana in 1889 when Cecil Rhodes’s British South
Africa Company started expanding north out of SouthAfrica,
expropriating great swaths of land that would eventually become
Northern and Southern Rhodesia, now Zambia and Zimbabwe. By 1895, the
year of the three chiefs’ visit to London, Rhodes had his eye on
territories to the southwest of Rhodesia, Bechuanaland. The chiefs
knew that only disaster and exploitation lay ahead for territories if
they fell under the control of Rhodes. Though it was impossible for
them to defeat Rhodes militarily, they were determined to fight him
any way they could. They decided to opt for the lesser of two evils:
greater control by the British rather than annexation by Rhodes. With
the help of the London Missionary Society, they traveled to London to
try to persuade Queen Victoria and Joseph Chamberlain, then colonial
secretary, to take greater control of Bechuanaland and protect it
from Rhodes.
On September 11,
1895, they had their first meeting with Chamberlain. Sebele spoke
first, then Bathoen, and finally Khama. Chamberlain declared that he
would consider imposing British control to protect the tribes from
Rhodes. In the meantime, the chiefs quickly embarked on a nationwide
speaking tour to drum up popular support for their requests. They
visited and spoke at Windsor and Reading, close to London; in
Southampton on the south coast; and in Leicester and Birmingham, in
Chamberlain’s political support base, the Midlands. They went north
to industrial Yorkshire, to Sheffield, Leeds, Halifax, and Bradford;
they also went west to Bristol and then up to Manchester and
Liverpool.
Meanwhile, back
in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes was making preparations for what would
become the disastrous Jameson Raid, an armed assault on the Boer
Republic of the Transvaal, despite Chamberlain’s strong objections.
These events likely made Chamberlain much more sympathetic to the
chiefs’ plight than he might have been otherwise. On November 6,
they met with him again in London. The chiefs spoke through an
interpreter:
Chamberlain:
I will speak about the lands of the Chiefs, and about the railway,
and about the law which is to be observed in the territory of the
Chiefs … Now let us look at the map … We will take the land that
we want for the railway, and no more.
Khama: I
say, that if Mr. Chamberlain will take the land himself, I will be
content.
Chamberlain:
Then tell him that I will make the railway myself by the eyes of one
whom I will send and I will take only as much as I require, and will
give compensation if what I take is of value.
Khama: I
would like to know how [i.e., where] the railway will go.
Chamberlain:
It shall go through his territory but shall be fenced in, and we will
take no land.
Khama: I
trust that you will do this work as for myself, and treat me fairly
in this matter.
Chamberlain:
I will guard your interests.
The next day,
Edward Fairfield, at the Colonial Office, explained Chamberlain’s
settlement in more detail:
Each of the three
chiefs, Khama, Sebele and Bathoen, shall have a country within which
they shall live as hitherto under the protection of the Queen. The
Queen shall appoint an officer to reside with them. The chiefs will
rule their own people much as at present.
Rhodes’s
reaction to being outmaneuvered by the three African chiefs was
predictable. He cabled to one of his employees, saying, “I do
object to being beaten by three canting natives.”
The chiefs in
fact had something valuable that they had protected from Rhodes and
would subsequently protect from British indirect rule. By the
nineteenth century, the Tswana states had developed a core set of
political institutions. These involved both an unusual degree, by
sub- Saharan African standards, of political centralization and
collective decision-making procedures that can even be viewed as a
nascent, primitive form of pluralism. Just as the Magna Carta enabled
the participation of barons into the political decision-making
process and put some restrictions on the actions of the English
monarchs, the political institutions of the Tswana, in particular the
kgotla, also encouraged political participation and constrained
chiefs. The South African anthropologist Isaac Schapera describes how
the kgotla worked as follows:
all matters of
tribal policy are dealt with finally before a general assembly of the
adult males in the chief’s kgotla (council place). Such meetings
are very frequently held … among the topics discussed … are
tribal disputes, quarrels between the chief and his relatives, the
imposition of new levies, the undertaking of new public works, the
promulgation of new decrees by the chief … it is not unknown for
the tribal assembly to overrule the wishes of the chief. Since anyone
may speak, these meetings enable him to ascertain the feelings of the
people generally, and provide the latter with an opportunity of
stating their grievances. If the occasion calls for it, he and his
advisers may be taken severely to task, for the people are seldom
afraid to speak openly and frankly.
Beyond the
kgotla, the Tswana chieftaincy was not strictly hereditary but open
to any man demonstrating significant talent and ability.
Anthropologist John Comaroff studied in detail the political history
of another of the Tswana states, the Rolong. He showed that though in
appearance the Tswana had clear rules stipulating how the chieftancy
was to be inherited, in practice these rules were interpreted to
remove bad rulers and allow talented candidates to become chief. He
showed that winning the chieftancy was a matter of achievement, but
was then rationalized so that the successful competitor appeared to
be the rightful heir. The Tswana captured this idea with a proverb,
with a tinge of constitutional monarchy: kgosi ke kgosi ka morafe,
“The king is king by the grace of the people.”
The Tswana chiefs
continued in their attempts to maintain their independence from
Britain and preserve their indigenous institutions after their trip
to London. They conceded the construction of railways in
Bechuanaland, but limited the intervention of the British in other
aspects of economic and political life. They were not opposed to the
construction of the railways, certainly not for the same reasons as
the Austro-Hungarian and Russian monarchs blocked railways. They just
realized that railways, like the rest of the policies of the British,
would not bring development to Bechuanaland as long as it was under
colonial control. The early experience of Quett Masire, president of
independent Botswana from 1980 to 1998, explains why. Masire was an
enterprising farmer in the 1950s; he developed new cultivation
techniques for sorghum and found a potential customer in Vryburg
Milling, a company located across the border in South Africa. He went
to the railway station master at Lobatse in Bechuanaland and asked to
rent two rail trucks to move his crop to Vryburg. The station master
refused. Then he got a white friend to intervene. The station master
reluctantly agreed, but quoted Masire four times the rate for whites.
Masire gave up and concluded, “It was the practice of the whites,
not just the laws prohibiting Africans from owning freehold land or
holding trading licenses that kept blacks from developing enterprises
in Bechuanaland.”
All in all, the
chiefs, and the Tswana people, had been lucky. Perhaps against all
odds, they succeeded in preventing Rhodes’s takeover. As
Bechuanaland was still marginal for the British, the establishment of
indirect rule there did not create the type of vicious circle playing
out in Sierra Leone. They also avoided the kind of colonial expansion
that went on in the interior of South Africa that would turn those
lands into reservoirs of cheap labor for white miners or farmers. The
early stages of the process of colonization are a critical juncture
for most societies, a crucial period during which events that will
have important long-term consequences for their economic and
political development transpire. As we discussed in chapter 9, most
societies in sub-Saharan Africa, just as those in South America and
South Asia, witnessed the establishment or intensification of
extractive institutions during colonization. The Tswana would instead
avoid both intense indirect rule and the far worse fate that would
have befallen them had Rhodes succeeded in annexing their lands. This
was not just blind luck, however. It was once again a result of the
interplay between the existing institutions, shaped by the
institutional drift of the Tswana people, and the critical juncture
brought about by colonialism. The three chiefs had made their own
luck by taking the initiative and traveling to London, and they were
able to do this because they had an unusual degree of authority,
compared with other tribal leaders in sub- Saharan Africa, owing to
the political centralization the Tswana tribes had achieved, and
perhaps they also had an unusual degree of legitimacy, because of the
modicum of pluralism embedded in their tribal institutions.
Another critical
juncture at the end of the colonial period would be more central to
the success of Botswana, enabling it to develop inclusive
institutions. By the time Bechuanaland became independent in 1966
under the name Botswana, the lucky success of chiefs Sebele, Bathoen,
and Khama was long in the past. In the intervening years, the British
invested little in Bechuanaland. At independence, Botswana was one of
the poorest countries in the world; it had a total of twelve
kilometers of paved roads, twenty-two citizens who had graduated from
university, and one hundred from secondary school. To top it all off,
it was almost completely surrounded by the white regimes of South
Africa, Namibia, and Rhodesia, all of which were hostile to
independent African countries run by blacks. It would have been on
few people’s list of countries most likely to succeed. Yet over the
next forty-five years, Botswana would become one of the
fastest-growing countries in the world. Today Botswana has the
highest per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa, and is at the same
level as successful Eastern European countries such as Estonia and
Hungary, and the most successful Latin American nations, such as
Costa Rica.
How did Botswana
break the mold? By quickly developing inclusive economic and
political institutions after independence. Since then, it has been
democratic, holds regular and competitive elections, and has never
experienced civil war or military intervention. The government set up
economic institutions enforcing property rights, ensuring
macroeconomic stability, and encouraging the development of an
inclusive market economy. But of course, the more challenging
question is, how did Botswana manage to establish a stable democracy
and pluralistic institutions, and choose inclusive economic
institutions, while most other African countries did the opposite? To
answer this, we have to understand how a critical juncture, this time
the end of colonial rule, interacted with Botswana’s existing
institutions.
In most of
sub-Saharan Africa—for example, for Sierra Leone and
Zimbabwe—independence was an opportunity missed, accompanied by the
re-creation of the same type of extractive institutions that existed
during the colonial period. Early stages of independence would play
out very differently in Botswana, again largely because of the
background created by Tswana historical institutions. In this,
Botswana exhibited many parallels to England on the verge of the
Glorious Revolution. England had achieved rapid political
centralization under the Tudors and had the Magna Carta and the
tradition of Parliament that could at least aspire to constrain
monarchs and ensure some degree of pluralism. Botswana also had some
amount of state centralization and relatively pluralistic tribal
institutions that survived colonialism. England had a newly forming
broad coalition, consisting of Atlantic traders, industrialists, and
the commercially minded gentry, that was in favor of well-enforced
property rights. Botswana had its coalition in favor of secure
procedure rights, the Tswana chiefs, and elites who owned the major
assets in the economy, cattle. Even though land was held communally,
cattle was private property in the Tswana states, and the elites were
similarly in favor of well-enforced property rights. All this of
course is not denying the contingent path of history. Things would
have turned out very differently in England if parliamentary leaders
and the new monarch had attempted to use the Glorious Revolution to
usurp power. Similarly, things could have turned out very differently
in Botswana, especially if it hadn’t been so fortunate as to have
leaders such as Seretse Khama, or Quett Masire, who decided to
contest power in elections rather than subvert the electoral system,
as many post independence leaders in sub-Saharan Africa did.
At independence
the Tswana emerged with a history of institutions enshrining limited
chieftaincy and some degree of accountability of chiefs to the
people. The Tswana were of course not unique in Africa for having
institutions like this, but they were unique in the extent to which
these institutions survived the colonial period unscathed. British
rule had been all but absent. Bechuanaland was administered from
Mafeking, in South Africa, and it was only during the transition to
independence in the 1960s that the plans for the capital of Gaborone
were laid out. The capital and the new structures there were not
meant to expunge the indigenous institutions, but to build on them;
as Gaborone was constructed, new kgotlas were planned along with it.
Independence was
also a relatively orderly affair. The drive for independence was led
by the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), founded in 1960 by Quett
Masire and Seretse Khama. Khama was the grandson of King Khama III;
his given name, Seretse, means “the clay that binds together.” It
was to be an extraordinarily apt name. Khama was the hereditary chief
of the Ngwato, and most of the Tswana chiefs and elites joined the
Botswana Democratic Party. Botswana didn’t have a marketing board,
because the British had been so uninterested in the colony. The BDP
quickly set one up in 1967, the Botswana Meat Commission. But instead
of expropriating the ranchers and cattle owners, the Meat Commission
played a central role in developing the cattle economy; it put up
fences to control foot-and-mouth disease and promoted exports, which
would both contribute to economic development and increase the
support for inclusive economic institutions.
Though the early
growth in Botswana relied on meat exports, things changed
dramatically when diamonds were discovered. The management of natural
resources in Botswana also differed markedly from that in other
African nations. During the colonial period, the Tswana chiefs had
attempted to block prospecting for minerals in Bechuanaland because
they knew that if Europeans discovered precious metals or stones,
their autonomy would be over. The first big diamond discovery was
under Ngwato land, Seretse Khama’s traditional homeland. Before the
discovery was announced, Khama instigated a change in the law so that
all subsoil mineral rights were vested in the nation, not the tribe.
This ensured that diamond wealth would not create great inequities in
Botswana. It also gave further impetus to the process of state
centralization as diamond revenues could now be used for building a
state bureaucracy and infrastructure and for investing in education.
In Sierra Leone and many other sub-Saharan African nations, diamonds
fueled conflict between different groups and helped to sustain civil
wars, earning the label Blood Diamonds for the carnage brought about
by the wars fought over their control. In Botswana, diamond revenues
were managed for the good of the nation.
The change in
subsoil mineral rights was not the only policy of state building that
Seretse Khama’s government implemented. Ultimately, the Chieftaincy
Act of 1965 passed by the legislative assembly prior to independence,
and the Chieftaincy Amendment Act of 1970 would continue the process
of political centralization, enshrining the power of the state and
the elected president by removing from chiefs the right to allocate
land and enabling the president to remove a chief from office if
necessary. Another facet of political centralization was the effort
to unify the country further, for example, with legislation ensuring
that only Setswana and English were to be taught in school. Today
Botswana looks like a homogenous country, without the ethnic and
linguistic fragmentation associated with many other African nations.
But this was an outcome of the policy to have only English and a
single national language, Setswana, taught in schools to minimize
conflict between different tribes and groups within society. The last
census to ask questions about ethnicity was the one taken in 1946,
which revealed considerable heterogeneity in Botswana. In the Ngwato
reserve, for example, only 20 percent of the population identified
themselves as pure Ngwato; though there were other Tswana tribes
present, there were also many non-Tswana groups whose first language
was not Setswana. This underlying heterogeneity has been modulated
both by the policies of the postindependence government and by the
relatively inclusive institutions of the Tswana tribes in the same
way as heterogeneity in Britain, for example, between the English and
the Welsh, has been modulated by the British state. The Botswanan
state did the same. Since independence, the census in Botswana has
never asked about ethnic heterogeneity, because in Botswana everyone
is Tswana.
Botswana achieved
remarkable growth rates after independence because Seretse Khama,
Quett Masire, and the Botswana Democratic Party led Botswana onto a
path of inclusive economic and political institutions. When the
diamonds came on stream in the 1970s, they did not lead to civil war,
but provided a strong fiscal base for the government, which would use
the revenues to invest in public services. There was much less
incentive to challenge or overthrow the government and control the
state. Inclusive political institutions bred political stability and
supported inclusive economic institutions. In a pattern familiar from
the virtuous circle described in chapter 11, inclusive economic
institutions increased the viability and durability of inclusive
political institutions.
Botswana broke
the mold because it was able to seize a critical juncture,
postcolonial independence, and set up inclusive institutions. The
Botswana Democratic Party and the traditional elites, including Khama
himself, did not try to form a dictatorial regime or set up
extractive institutions that might have enriched them at the expense
of society. This was once again an outcome of the interplay between a
critical juncture and existing institutions. As we have seen,
differently from almost anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa, Botswana
already had tribal institutions that had achieved some amount of
centralized authority and contained important pluralistic features.
Moreover, the country had economic elites who themselves had much to
gain from secure property rights.
No less
important, the contingent path of history worked in Botswana’s
favor. It was particularly lucky because Seretse Khama and Quett
Masire were not Siaka Stevens and Robert Mugabe. The former worked
hard and honestly to build inclusive institutions on the foundations
of the Tswanas’ tribal institutions. All this made it more likely
that Botswana would succeed in taking a path toward inclusive
institutions, whereas much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa did not
even try, or failed outright.
