We must accept that the days when diamonds used to carry our economy high for extended periods of growth are gone and will not be coming back. This is not to say that diamonds will going forward have no role to play. In fact for a foreseeable future, diamonds will continue to occupy that prime space in Botswana’s economic path. And there is no paradox about these two statements.
All we are highlighting is the fact that the days when diamonds acted like a performance enhancing drug, forever pushing and pulling our economy are behind us. This is a key economic lesson that we must take with us as we emerge from what has been the worst economic times in recent memory. New ways have to found and established as alternatives to diamonds. The most obvious option in our view is productivity. This is because when it comes to productivity there is still a lot of room for improvement in our country. Another reality is that painful as it is, diamonds no longer sell as they used to. When they do sell, getting them off the ground has now become complicated and expensive, meaning that the profit margins are squeezed much more than it has ever been the case.
The solution we want to emphasise lies in growing our productivity levels. By growing our national levels of productivity we have a real chance of increasing our economic output which if pushed to appropriate levels can make us as a country to reach new levels of economic competitiveness which even the diamond sales at their best of times could not reach. Let us face it, while diamonds have indeed been a boon for Botswana in that the proceeds from therein allowed us to create a viable economy that is today an envy of many countries in the world, it did come with its own challenges.
While in other countries people killed each other over such resources like diamonds, in our case the curse was somewhat different. What happened is that the money from diamonds, because it was so splendid, blinded us to the fact that we needed to improve on such matters like efficiency. Because money was never a big issue, we found ourselves often willing to pay more than ten times what was really the price. This culture has bequeathed us with problems we are still grappling with up to this day when money has long run out and only efficiencies could see us through. Weaning ourselves away from this culture is not going to be easy. The sad part of it is that there is no short cut to improving productivity. This is because productivity is not an event, but rather a process that ultimately becomes a culture.
Our view is that the Botswana National Productivity Centre which was established to coordinate productivity really has to be revamped and be given a new impetus as well as power to lead what has to be a national revolution if we are to succeed. We hope that as we enter into the New Year in earnest every Motswana will strive to be more productive in whatever they do than was the case in the previous years. Only then can the prosperity which has up to now remained elusive be realized.
