The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [149]
But Botswana did not fail. It succeeded not just moderately well, but spectacularly. In the thirty years after independence it grew its per capita GDP faster on average (nearly 8 per cent) than any other country in the entire world – faster than Japan, China, South Korea and America during that period. It multiplied its per capita income thirteen times so that its average citizens are now richer than Thais, Bulgarians or Peruvians. It has had no coups, civil wars or dictators. It has experienced no hyperinflation or debt default. It did not wipe out its elephants. It is consistently the most successful economy in the world in recent decades.
It is true that Botswana has a small and ethnically somewhat homogeneous population, unlike many other countries. But its biggest advantage is one that the rest of Africa could easily have shared: good institutions. In particular, Botswana turns out to have secure, enforceable property rights that are fairly widely distributed and fairly well respected. When Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues compared property rights with economic growth throughout the world, they found that the first explained an astonishing three quarters of the variation in the second and that Botswana was no outlier: the reason it had flourished was because its people owned property without fear of confiscation by chiefs or thieves to a much greater extent than in the rest of Africa. This is much the same explanation for why England had a good eighteenth century while China did not.
So give the rest of Africa good property rights and sit back and wait for enterprise to work its magic? If only it were that easy. Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons. They must evolve from below. And it turns out that Botswana’s institutions have deep evolutionary roots. The Tswana people who conquered the native Khoisan tribes in the eighteenth century (and still do not necessarily treat them well) had a political system that was remarkably, well, democratic. Cattle were privately owned, but land was owned collectively. The chiefs, who in theory allocated land and grazing rights, were under a strong obligation to consult an assembly, or kgotla. The Tswana were also inclusive, happy to bring other tribes into their system, which stood them in good stead when a collective army was needed to repel the Boers at the battle of Dimawe in 1852.
This was a good start, but Botswana then had a stroke of good fortune in its colonial experience. It was incorporated into the British empire in such a half-hearted and inattentive fashion that it barely experienced colonial rule. The British took it mainly to stop the Germans or Boers getting it. ‘Doing as little in the way of administration or settlement as possible’ was explicitly stated as government policy in 1885. Botswana was left alone, experiencing almost as little direct European imperialism as those later success stories of Asia – places like Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China. In 1895, three Tswana chiefs went to Britain and successfully pleaded with Queen Victoria to be kept out of the clutches of Cecil Rhodes; in the 1930s, two chiefs went to court to prevent another attempt at more intrusive colonial rule and though they failed, the war then kept bossy commissioners at bay. Benign neglect continued.
After independence, Botswana’s first president, Seretse Khama, one of the chiefs, behaved like most African leaders in setting out to build a strong state and disenfranchise the chiefs, as well as to win all future elections (so far so good for his party under two