Intellectual – Foresight & Big Ideas · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026
A rising debt ratio is usually met with talk of cuts; the more useful response is to grow what the same workforce can produce. At an IBCCI event in March 2025, economist Keith Jefferis pressed that case, stressing digital training to boost productivity while warning that government debt could reach 31 percent of GDP by 2025/26.
The pairing is the argument. Jefferis did not present the debt warning and the productivity prescription as separate items but as two ends of one line: a state borrowing more needs an economy that generates more per worker to carry it, and digital skills are among the cheapest ways to lift that figure. Read together, the two halves turn a fiscal warning into a capability brief.
The Warning: A Debt Ratio Worth Naming
Debt at 31 percent of GDP is not, by international standards, a crisis number – many economies, advanced and developing, operate comfortably far above it. The significance is directional, and it is specific to Botswana's history. For an economy long anchored to diamond revenue and known for fiscal caution and substantial reserves, a debt ratio climbing toward that level signals that the old cushions are thinning. Diamond income is finite and cyclical; the demand on the state – infrastructure, services, a young workforce entering the labour market – is not.
What that means for operators is a likely shift in how public money behaves. As fiscal space narrows, government spending tends to become more conditional and more scrutinised, and the case for any project increasingly has to rest on what it builds rather than what it merely funds. Firms that depend on government contracts, subsidies or the broad spending environment should read the 31 percent figure as the early edge of a tighter, more demanding fiscal posture rather than a number to file away.
The figure is not alarming on its own; the direction of travel is what merits attention.
The Prescription: Productivity Before Austerity
Digital training is a productivity lever because it raises output without raising headcount – the same workers, doing more, with better tools and methods. For Botswana, where diversification away from mining has been a stated aim for decades, Jefferis's framing puts the weight on capability rather than only on standing up new sectors. A more digitally capable workforce is an input every sector can use at once: the public service processing more with the same staff, banks and retailers automating routine work, small firms in Francistown and Maun reaching customers and suppliers they could not before.
The appeal of the skills route, against the alternative of cuts, is that it expands the base rather than shrinking the spend. Austerity manages a debt ratio by reducing the numerator; productivity manages it by growing the denominator – a larger economy makes a given debt load lighter without anyone's services being cut. Delivered to a business audience at IBCCI, that is a deliberately operator-friendly message: the way out is to build, and the building is a choice the country has to make on purpose rather than a result it can assume.
You cannot cut your way to productivity; you have to build the capability that produces it.
The value of pairing a debt warning with a skills prescription is that it resists the reflex to treat fiscal pressure as a spending problem alone. Jefferis's argument is that the more durable answer to a rising debt ratio is an economy whose people produce more – and that the digital training to get there is a deliberate investment, not an automatic outcome. For Botswana, the message lands at a useful moment: while the debt is still modest and the reserves still real, the cheaper time to build productive capacity is before the fiscal squeeze arrives, not after.
Sources: allAfrica
