Botswana turns 60 in a diamond slump — Khama's rarest number was never the mine

Three leaders top our Scorecard's ranking for GDP per head against other African countries over the same years — Seretse Khama, Teodoro Obiang and Abiy Ahmed — and only Khama pairs it with democracy: +254% from 1966 to 1980 against a median of +18%, and the 98th percentile on electoral democracy, where Obiang sits at P43 and Abiy at P64. Of the 43 leaders we can grade on both counts, he is one of four in the top quarter on each, and the only one of the four above P79 on democracy. The usual reading is that diamonds made Botswana, and our data half agrees — Orapa was found in 1967, opened in 1971, and the money followed — but sixty years on it is the mine that is failing and the institutions that are holding, and our Power block shows how little of them was compulsory: the 1966 constitution set no term limit, the ten-year cap arriving only in 1997, and Khama, who faced no coup in fourteen years, kept elections genuinely contested anyway. They held under the hardest test available: in the year the economy shrank 2.8%, voters put the party Khama founded fourth, and Mokgweetsi Masisi conceded on 1 November 2024. We asked in August of the Congo's minerals deals who benefits; Botswana is the case that answered, and the real test of its seventh decade is whether a government that inherited the institutions but not the revenue can bring debt back under its own legal ceiling without moving the ceiling.