When you call the Gaborone Botswana Telecommunications Corporation number of a locally-registered Internet service provider, the person who answers the call is not a Motswana in Gaborone but an Afrikaans-accented South African in Johannesburg. How that happens is not just a miracle of digital technology but also revealing of a deeply problematic issue that Professor Christian Makgala, Professor Monageng Mogalakwe and David Magang analyse in South Africa’s Underdevelopment of Botswana from the 1850s to the Present: A Case Study on sub- Imperialism in Southern Africa.
One understands why the South Africa of the 1850s would have been unfavourably predisposed to what became Botswana. That present-day, black-ruled South Africa would have similar predisposition is a clear indication that something has remained constant. The author-trio identifies that as “a realpolitik foreign policy” through which South Africa’s interests are prioritised over those of other regional players like Botswana.
“It was a case of ‘South Africa First’, to borrow a recently familiar phrase from the American scene,” says the paper, referring to Donald Trump’s “America First” policy.
In a broader sense, the paper confirms what the introduction asserts by citing complaints that South African businesses in Botswana don’t “accord leeway to their local management to make decisions on the spot concerning buying products from Botswana producers, as they were micromanaged from across the border.” The trio tie what South Africa is doing today to what Britain did during its colonial conquest and occupation of what became Botswana.
Through the Credit Sales to Native Proclamation, the borrowing capacity of “natives” was restricted to £35 a year; “modern” commercial activities were reserved for whites and Asians while natives were restricted to agriculture; the ‘good-fors’ trade system enabled white traders to obtain African products on the cheap and sell them at exorbitant prices; whites were given exclusive trade monopolies in certain reserves and crown lands; and, the economic wellbeing of Bechuanaland was subverted by imposing a hut tax that forced able-bodied men to work as cheap labour in South African mines. With precise regard to the latter, the paper quotes a report by South Africa’s Mines Native Wages Commission which stated that it was cost-effective to obtain unskilled labour and pay it at a below-market rate in order to prevent a situation where good wages would produce permanent workers who would demand higher wages. Resultantly, “white mine employers were assured of a steady supply of cheap African labour from the periphery of the capitalist revolution taking place in South Africa at that time.”
While the first most obvious intention of this underdevelopment was economic, one aspect of it was racial. Way after the British had left South Africa but at a time that Bechuanaland still existed as a British-governed geo-polity, the South African government introduced weight restrictions on cattle imports from Botswana. When South African meat production was high, the Botswana cattle imports forced down producer prices and while it reduced profitability, it benefitted the consumer. At the expense of the consumers, the South African government decided to side with producers. South Africa had the option of a trade embargo but reasoned that such embargo would hurt white cattle producers in Botswana. Beyond protecting white farmers in both South Africa and Bechuanaland from competition with African farmers in Bechuanaland, there was also clear intent to exert political pressure on the British to allow the incorporation of Botswana into the Union of South Africa.
For decades, South Africa has also short-changed Botswana in the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) Agreement through which customs, excise, and additional duties are collected into a common revenue pool. The money collected is then apportioned on the basis of an agreed revenue sharing formula. When this Agreement went into effect in 1910, Bechuanaland got a measly 0.5 percent while South Africa got a whopping 99 percent. In 1925, South Africa used the Agreement to turn the whole of Southern Africa region into a consumer market for its manufactures. South Africa was also to become the sole administrator of the common SACU revenue pool, setting SACU import duties and excise policy. The sole decision-making powers of South Africa led to unequitable revenue sharing.
When the Agreement was renegotiated in 1969, South Africa gifted Botswana with a Trojan horse. The country was allowed leeway to impose a special import duty on goods procured from fellow SACU members for up to eight years and on the precondition that this should be in relation to protecting an embryonic industry that Botswana was itself a market of. This provided motivation for the Botswana Development Corporation to partner with a German company called the Urtger Group and set up a brewery company called Prinz Brau in Gaborone.
“Prinz Brau started operation in 1976 and enjoyed insulation from competing imports in the form of a 100 percent duty on all beers imported into Botswana. The South Africans were incensed, Botswana’s sin being that she had invited a German company rather than South African Breweries (SAB). The methods they resorted to in order to prevent the venture from flourishing seem stranger than fiction,” says the paper which references what former President Sir Ketumile Masire writes in his book about this episode.
“All sorts of foreign objects, including insects, somehow found their way into beer cans and bottles during production. This tampering took place in the hottest season of the year, during the Christmas and New Year holidays, when sales were traditionally the largest,” writes Masire in a book in which he bluntly says that South Africa “sabotaged” Prinz Brau.
For a much longer period of time, South Africa had opposed construction of Kazungula Bridge, which would have diverted cross-border traffic from Beitbridge, “claiming that there was no common border between Botswana and Zambia.”
The new, black-ruled South Africa continued to do what the old, white-ruled South Africa did – sabotage of infant industries in Botswana. The authors mention four examples: Hyundai, Volvo, International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) and De Beers.
In a bid to protect its own motor vehicle industry, South Africa sabotaged the Hyundai motor assembly plant in Gaborone. That it did by imposing an import limit of 1000 cars per month, “which was way below the profitable level of 2000 cars a month.” The plant did indeed shut down and relocate to South Africa where it “has been a roaring success, recording a turnover of 35 000 vehicles in 2019 alone.” South Africa did the same with the Swedish motor-manufacturer Volvo, the world’s second largest truck maker, which relocated from Gaborone to Durban in 2005. For the sabotage of the IFSC, South Africa mobilised its Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, who made false and disparaging public statements about it.
De Beers, which is a South African company, is in a class all its own. For almost four decades it resisted diamond beneficiation in Botswana and only caved in when President Festus Mogae played hard ball in his final term. The authors note how De Beers not only mined diamonds but also controlled the levers of power from behind the scenes.
“It is common knowledge, for instance, that De Beers had much to do with both the retirement of President Masire (1980-1998) and the accession of Lt. Gen. Ian Khama to the presidency of Botswana first as vice president to President Festus Mogae in 1998, and then president from 2008 to 2018.”
During the high noon of apartheid South Africa, “Botswanawas under an obligation to sound out South Africa every time the country contemplated joining a complementary economic grouping.” When South Africa essentially permitted Botswana to join the Preferential Trade Area (PTA) for Eastern and Southern Africa in 1977 that was because PTA wasn’t a threat to South Africa’s economic interests. Two years later, South Africa’s Prime Minister P.W. Botha came up with the idea of a Constellation of South African States (CONSAS), to burnish his country’s image and “sink its economic claws deeper into a total of 10 sovereign countries.” The rejection of this overture led to the establishment of the Southern African Development Coordination Conference, a regional economic community that has been renamed the Southern African Development Community.
On the basis of these and many more examples, Makgala, Mogalakwe and Magang argue that “Botswana may be as much a ‘political colony’ of South Africa as it is an ‘economic colony’.”
Makgala is a lecturer in the History Department at the University of Botswana; Mogalakwe works for the Institute for Advanced Study of African Renaissance Policies Ideas and Magang served as cabinet minister under presidents Masire and Mogae. The paper they collaborated on is published in a special issue of the Botswana Notes and Records that honours Professor Fred Morton on his retirement from the University of Botswana in 2020.
