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Peter Fabricius Correspondent
IT does not seem to have fully registered, at least outside Botswana, that President Ian Khama’s ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), which has been in power since independence in 1966, lost its majority of popular support last week.

Yes, of course the BDP was re-elected in the October 24 legislative elections.

And as a result, Khama was also indirectly re-elected last Sunday by the new Parliament, to a second term as the country’s chief executive. But the BDP for the first time won less than 50 percent of the vote: 47 percent in fact, down from 52 percent in the last elections in 2009.

It was only because Botswana still operates a rather outdated first-past-the-post constituency voting system that the BDP was able to win this election for certain and stay in power for another five years.

The distortions of the winner-takes-all constituency system enabled it to translate 47 percent of the popular vote into 65 percent of the seats in Parliament; 37 seats out of 57 seats directly elected by the populace.

After adding the five extra seats indirectly elected by the Parliament — four specially elected members of Parliament (MPs) and the president — the BDP’s de facto support rose to over 67 percent, or 42 seats out of 62.

The specially-elected MPs are in theory neutral, but in practice have always, at least in essence, supported the BDP. As the results indicated, Khama and the BDP faced their biggest challenge in this election.

Though they didn’t quite form a totally united front, three opposition parties did join forces under the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), leaving just the Botswana Congress Party (BCP) out on its own.

The UDC won 17 seats and the BCP just three. However, the UDC won a more impressive 32 percent of the vote, the BCP 18 percent, while independent candidates got 3 percent.

This meant, of course, that if Botswana had had a proportional representation voting system, like South Africa, the two opposition parties would together have commanded 50 percent of the seats in Parliament, more than the BDP’s 47 percent.

That could have left the independents as the kingmakers, depending, of course, on voting thresholds for the allocation of seats, and so on.

The Botswana government enjoys a stellar reputation internationally and comes out near the top on rankings of African governance, including, most recently, the Mo Ibrahim 2014 Index of African governance where it ranked third, just behind Mauritius and Cape Verde and above South Africa.

Yet the election results suggest that the people of Botswana don’t all quite share that global enthusiasm for their government. The main problem seems to be that the country’s considerable wealth is not being spread around very widely.

Botswana still earns most of its government revenue through its lucrative partnership — Debswana — with the South African diamond giant De Beers. That has helped to give the thinly populated country of just two million a higher per capita gross domestic product (GDP) — US$14 000 per annum in purchasing power parity terms — than its much larger neighbour, South Africa. But not enough of the money has trickled down to ordinary Batswana.

The BDP government is, of course, aware that it cannot forever rely so heavily on diamonds — which directly account for about 85 percent of export revenue and around 35 percent of GDP.

Botswana has, to its credit, largely escaped the resource curse that has ruined so many other African countries. It has managed its diamonds well, and Khama improved this performance by establishing a diamond-sorting and sales facility in Botswana to reap some of the secondary benefits from the gems also. Diamond revenue finances comparatively generous social welfare.

But, as Brenthurst Director, Greg Mills, points out in his book Why States Recover, Botswana has so far failed to make the breakthrough to the next level of development by diversifying its economy. Not for want of trying. The government had made several direct interventions in the economy, some of which he himself was involved in – such as offering low-interest loans to would-be entrepreneurs.

None of these have really helped and Mills concludes that Botswana might do better by focusing its attentions more broadly, on lowering taxes and generally creating a better business environment than that of neighbouring South Africa to attract investment.

Khama has betrayed some rather worrying authoritarian and dynastic tendencies. A Sandhurst-trained military officer, Khama is rather intolerant of criticism, particularly from the media. Last month he had newspaper editor Outsa Mokone arrested for publishing a report, which Khama has strongly denied, that he had been involved in an unreported motor vehicle accident.

His government’s eviction of the Basarwa or Bushmen people from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve has also been criticised as high-handed.—ISS.