Botswana’s Misunderstood “Miracle”

The country’s 2024 presidential contest was a big surprise, as voters elected a new party for the first time. Despite decades of dominant-party rule, a strong democratic culture has long been ingrained in Botswana. 

By Samuel Anim

January 2025

Kenneth Good thought Botswana was overhyped. In his 2008 book, Diamonds, Dispossession, and Democracy in Botswana, the Australian political scientist, who passed away in 2020, found little cause for optimism about the country that many have called “the African miracle” of economic growth, democratic governance, and stability. “In a continent full of bad news, success stories shone brighter, and exaggerations readily occurred and acquired permanency,” he wrote. Three years before the book’s publication, Good had been expelled from Botswana for criticizing the country’s leaders. Sacked from his teaching position at the national university without pay, his predicament was, in his eyes, a symptom of what was ailing the country’s democracy: a totalizing form of presidentialism wielded by a dominant ruling party.

Good concluded that Botswana’s “miracle” story was an empty narrative peddled by elites. He also saw it as a branding message that starry-eyed outsiders and scholars “uncritically” accepted. For him, Botswana was an “authoritarian system” where “regular . . . elections have never produced a change of government.” Good’s diagnoses are running themes in the concerns observers have routinely expressed about Botswana’s democracy. A 2016 Afrobarometer paper by Rorisang Lekalake notes that Botswana’s “remarkable stability has come at the cost of further political development.” The country’s democracy, Lekalake argues, is defined by “low civic participation, relatively weak opposition and civil society sectors, and a lack of incumbent turnover in 11 consecutive free and fair elections.”

For these reasons, Botswana’s election result was not expected to make headlines in 2024 — a year packed with consequential polls. Democracy watchers can be forgiven for this oversight. Since 1966, when Botswana gained independence from Britain after eight decades as a protectorate, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) ruled the country. Even after the discovery of diamonds in 1967, the BDP’s leaders governed with a prudence and stewardship rarely seen in Africa. For this, voters happily returned them to office time and again — until November 2024.

The election results surprised observers across the world, including those who had hoped and worked for change. Even the country’s newly elected president, Duma Boko of the opposition Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), remarked, “It shocked me, the numbers . . . I’m humbled.” Boko had galvanized the alliance of center-left parties to dethrone the BDP after decades of failed attempts. His young supporters were similarly in a state of disbelief. One commented, “I did not ever think I would witness this change in my life. The BDP had stayed too long in power, and I am proud to be part of the people that removed them for a better Botswana.”

Even more surprising was how the incumbent president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, whose party had never lost an election, responded to this unforeseen loss. On a continent where incumbents rarely lose elections and sometimes fail to relinquish power when voted out, Masisi gracefully conceded defeat and promised to “respectfully step aside,” even though he “wanted to stay on as . . . president.” He has participated in a smooth transition process and has offered to “support the new administration.” Botswana’s situation contrasts sharply with nearby Mozambique. There, the similarly dominant Frelimo party, which has ruled since independence in 1975, is clinging to power after losing what observers report was a sham election in October 2024.

Why has democracy had a largely good career in Botswana? And how can we further understand the dramatic outcome of November’s election and the impressive responses to it? The unique characteristics of Botswana’s political system have helped to sustain democracy despite nearly sixty years without a single political turnover. Democracy scholars would be wise to take note — and to think deeply about when and how turnovers matter to democratic change and about the roles that local ideas and practices play in political transitions.

More Than Meets the Eye

Upon assuming power, President Boko declared, “Botswana today sends a message to the whole world and says, democracy is alive here.” Indeed, democracy is and has always been alive in Botswana, despite the concerns observers have routinely expressed. Had this not been the case, perhaps the reflexes of the incumbent president and his party would not have been to accept defeat so readily and usher in new governors.

The fundamental element undergirding Botswana’s politics and its democratic trajectory are deeply entrenched indigenous theories and practices of participatory governance and public accountability. The anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff show in their 2012 book, Theory from the South, that “Tswana ideas about the proper means of governance were elaborate, nuanced, and enduring.” The Tswana ethnic group comprises eight subgroups that together make up four-fifths of the country’s population, making Botswana a near-perfect nation-state. Tswana chiefs were traditionally expected to exercise authority with the people rather than over them. While in power, rulers were repeatedly reminded that “a chief is a chief by the nation.” For this reason, in addition to selecting capable advisors to guide a chief’s actions, traditional rulers were expected to hold regular public assemblies called kgotla — forums for deliberation that enable the public to contribute to local policies and counterbalance a chief’s authority.

While many indigenous African political systems were decimated by colonial rule, Botswana’s experience as a protectorate that Britain managed with a policy of “noninterference” ensured that vital components of Tswana culture and institutions remained intact. This allowed postcolonial leaders to stitch them tightly onto modern democratic frameworks. Following independence, “freedom squares” or public forums akin to the original kgotla were “created all over the country, including in urban contexts.” The existence of these structures and their underlying ideologies greatly shaped elite behavior. The Comaroffs note that Quett Masire, Botswana’s second president, “went from kgotla to kgotla in an effort to persuade people to vote, to prove his willingness to listen to their demands, and to assure them that he would govern them well.”

Before Masire, founding president Seretse Khama had also made crucial choices that safeguarded the future of Botswana’s democracy. In 1974, when support for the BDP was at its highest (with 85 percent of the vote), Seretse Khama ardently rejected widespread demands to merge all the existing parties into a one-party state. According to the Comaroffs, he “felt compelled to comment repeatedly on the subject, to refuse to even ponder the possibility — and to encourage people both to vote and to consider the merits of all parties.” This willingness to uphold multipartism occurred in a decade when coups and big-man rule were sweeping across Africa. From these well-established democratic principles and elites’ decisions, successive BDP governments made “democracy” one of the core pillars of the state, with a commitment to build “an open, democratic and accountable nation.”

Masisi’s civil response to an unprecedented electoral defeat was a product of this legacy. Despite the almost sixty-year absence of a political turnover, democracy and its values became ingrained in Botswana through the words and deeds of its leaders. Any action that contravened democratic norms would have been a deviation from the trail blazed by Masisi’s predecessors.

Democratic Rollback and Pushback

These ideas and practices also help to explain why the BDP fell out of favor. Beyond shaping the actions of elites, they also structure citizens’ expectations. Consider the notion “a chief is a chief by the nation,” for instance. According to the Comaroffs, the chiefs knew that they would be judged by their actions: If they treated people with respect, the people would, in turn, treat them with respect; if a chief shunned the people, the people would likewise shun the chief. Such standards conditioned people to watch for whether a chief made improvements.

These values constitute what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “social imaginaries” — that is, how “people imagine their social existence” and “the expectations that are normally met,” as well as the norms that inform those expectations. In Botswana, social imaginaries operate in conjunction with the kgotla structures. It is through the interactions of these local forums that leaders negotiate their authority. Traditionally, chiefs who lost their legitimacy as a result of underperformance or violating public trust would find themselves either unable to exert authority or facing removal from office. The process by which a ruler lost legitimacy, the Comaroffs observe, was never sudden.

We can see an element of this slow process in the case of the BDP. The party’s fall from grace largely started with the 2008–18 presidency of Ian Khama, the son of Seretse Khama. During the younger Khama’s tenure, Botswana’s gold-plated democratic credentials were blemished by what observers and civil society termed “creeping authoritarianism.” Although Botswana was rated “free” by Freedom House throughout his tenure, the country’s political landscape was marked by unprecedented human-rights violations and erosion of civil liberties. Khama and his allies were accused of embezzling money while unemployment and social inequality were spiking, and Khama blunted accountability by turning the legislature into a rubber stamp.

His actions were enabled partly by Botswana’s constitution, which states that the executive is permitted to “act in his or her own deliberate judgment and shall not be obliged to follow the advice tendered by any other person or authority.” Citizens and officeholders alike nevertheless judged Khama’s actions harshly, with members of parliament labeling him “vulture number one” and accusing him of preying on the country’s democracy. His actions also provoked a rare flurry of civic protests in Botswana.

The open criticism of Khama’s rule proceeded from the entrenched social imaginary that governs “good” leadership in the country and the restraint that previous leaders had demonstrated despite their enormous formal powers. The pushback against creeping illiberalism shows how ideas can structure expectations and offer strong democratic guardrails even when formal institutions are permissive.

Following his two presidential terms, Ian Khama chose Masisi as his successor. Despite Khama’s record, voters entrusted the BDP under Masisi’s leadership with another five-year term. While Masisi repealed some of Khama’s unpopular policies, many saw his tenure as more of the same. According to historian Christian John Makgala of the University of Botswana, oversight institutions that were weakened during the Khama administration were not repaired. Masisi also deployed national resources and the state intelligence service to target rivals — notably his predecessor, with whom he had fallen out after becoming president. Like Khama, Masisi was accused by journalists and opposition politicians of enriching himself through state contracts and doling out tenders to family members. He undermined judicial independence and the authority of traditional chiefs. Worse still, he made bad diplomatic moves by allying with Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

From these missteps as well as the lack of progress on major problems such as poverty and unemployment, the people concluded that Masisi had failed to make the improvements expected of him as a leader. He had shunned and disrespected the people by resorting to words and actions that flouted botho, the Tswana notion of civility. Viewed this way, Masisi had failed to be “a chief by the nation.”

By electing Duma Boko’s UDC, the citizens of Botswana have acknowledged the BDP’s failures. From this, we can understand that the decades-long support for the party was not a blind political relationship, but an ambivalent attachment underpinned by open-mindedness and critical loyalty. Had the BDP continued performing as well as in earlier decades, supporters would have remained loyal to the party and not ousted Masisi.

An Unfair Test

Students of democracy and elections can learn vital lessons from Botswana’s historic first turnover. While competitive elections offer opportunities to change political leaders and remove incumbents, the absence of turnovers does not automatically indicate a deficit of democracy. The looming influence of Samuel Huntington’s famous but simplistic “two-turnover” test, however, has led us to overemphasize alternations in power. The two-turnover benchmark — which argues that democracy is consolidated once power has changed hands twice between different parties — overlooks the substance of democracy and political progress. It also downplays or even demeans how local ideas and practices shape democracy in places that are historically and culturally distinct from the West. Yet it is by recognizing these hidden carriers of meaning that we can fully grasp the trajectories of political change in places like Botswana.

Samuel Anim recently completed his PhD in politics and international studies at the University of Warwick.

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

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