“Do we adopt insular and inward-looking strategies or do we open our country to investors and visitors, in the process creating a vibrant economy and society integrated into the global economy”
– Vision 2036 Preamble
The history of industrialised countries shows that they owe their success to trade openness and export orientation. These countries, without exception, recognise that the pursuit of high living standards and job opportunities cannot be based on insular and inward looking policies. They realise that to try to rely heavily on the domestic market as your engine of growth and jobs is hardly ever a winning strategy.
This is why therefore these countries place a lot of emphasis on trading with the rest of the world instead of thinking that they could grow by selling only to their domestic markets. The idea of only focusing on your domestic market is akin to selling to yourself. We know that if the only market for your goods and services is yourself then you are headed for stagnation and demise because there is only so much that you can buy from or sell to yourself.
So at the end of the day it is an inescapable fact that stagnation will set in down the line even if you have what looks like a huge domestic market. If a huge domestics market was all that mattered then countries with massive populations such as Nigeria, Japan, China, United States, Indonesia, Brazil and India would just sit back and not bother about attracting foreign direct investment as well as trading with the rest of the world. As we know however, these countries are not just content with their domestic markets and investors but are on a relentless push to sell goods and services to other parts of the world to lift their people out of poverty. Many of these countries have been trading beyond their borders for many centuries and have enjoyed tremendous economic benefits in the process.
Which brings me to Botswana whose domestic market when all has been said and done, is way too small to catapult the country into a high income economy without foreign direct investment and export markets. The domestic market is therefore not quite the proverbial tide that raises all ships. The reality about our small internal market is a matter that Botswana’s policymakers since Independence not only understood but embraced. For them it was also a matter of pragmatism .
Nowadays however there is a discernible shift in public policy whereby some in the hallowed corridors of power now treat the interplay between foreign direct investment and citizen empowerment as a zero sum game. They do so because their conception of citizen empowerment only starts and ends with the nationality of the business owner or investor. If the investor is a foreigner, the kneejerk reaction is to deny him public contracts. However as they focus on the nationalities of business owners and seek to marginalise them, they miss the trees for the forest and in the process jeopardise the welfare of many Batswana who work for foreign owned firms. And they are many such Batswana who work for audit forms, telecommunications companies, and insurance firms to name but a few. In doing so , the powers-that-be miss the basic fact that for multitudes of Batswana, empowerment is about having a job and not being obsessed about whether the job giver is a citizen or foreign investor.
If we become insular – as we seem to be – and fail to embrace foreign direct investment, export markets and the outside world, we are not going to make the transformation to high income, prosperity and jobs for all our people. Of course a small group of rent seekers is poised to benefit while the majority of people watch from the sidelines as foreign direct investment dwindles and take with it the best form of citizen empowerment: jobs.
