Money – Fintech & Payments · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · Global Issue · June 2026

Capital has learnt to follow the kilowatt. Renewable, oil-storage and grid projects are drawing strategic investment worldwide, and Botswana has positioned itself in that flow: the country signed energy and mineral exploration deals with Oman in April. The signal is that secure, modern energy infrastructure is no longer treated as a utility cost – it is the thing that decides where investment lands.

For a country that has long imported a share of its electricity, that shift is an opportunity rather than a threat. Energy that once looked like a vulnerability can be rebuilt as a magnet, provided the investment is structured to deliver supply that the next investor can count on. The same dependence that was a weakness becomes, once addressed, a credential.

The deals with Oman are one expression of a wider pattern in which capital, energy and minerals are negotiated together rather than apart. For Botswana the value is not only the immediate investment but the signal it sends – that the country is building the energy base on which later, larger commitments can rest.

Why capital chases energy

No factory, mine or data centre runs without reliable power, so investors increasingly treat energy security as a precondition before they commit to anything downstream of it. For Botswana, which has long depended on imported electricity, building generation, storage and grid capacity is a way to remove the doubt that makes capital hesitate. The Oman deals fold energy and mineral exploration into a single strategic relationship, the kind of arrangement that brings money and certainty together rather than chasing one after the other and hoping both eventually turn up.

Strategic capital differs from passive capital in exactly this respect. It looks for partners and positions, not just returns, and energy is where those positions are now being staked. A country that offers a credible energy future offers strategic investors a reason to commit early, before the supply is built and the easy entry has closed.

There is a sequencing logic here that favours the prepared. Energy infrastructure takes years to build, so the investment decisions made now determine which countries are ready to host the next wave of power-hungry industry and which are still negotiating for the electricity to run it. Botswana's move to secure energy partnerships is a bid to be in the first group.

Investment goes where the lights are guaranteed to stay on.

From import dependence to strategic asset

Renewables suit Botswana's geography, with abundant sun across the country, while oil-storage and grid investment add the resilience that a small, exposed economy needs. Each project that reduces reliance on imported energy also strengthens the case the country makes to the next investor – a compounding advantage in which every megawatt built makes the following one easier to finance.

The mineral side of the Oman partnership matters too. Pairing exploration with energy means the power to process what is found can be planned alongside the finding of it, rather than chased after the fact – a sequencing that keeps more of the value chain, and more of its returns, inside the country. Minerals shipped out raw earn once; minerals processed at home, with home-built power, earn at every stage.

For an economy long defined by what it digs up and sends away, the chance to add the processing as well as the extraction is significant. It depends, though, on the energy being there to do the work – which is why the energy and the minerals belong in the same conversation rather than separate ones.

Energy built today is the argument for the investment of tomorrow.

The so-what for Botswana is that energy policy and investment policy have merged into a single question. As global capital concentrates on power and grid projects, the deals the country signs now – with partners such as Oman – shape not just its electricity supply but its standing as a place where strategic money is willing to settle. The grid is no longer only infrastructure; it is the country's pitch to the investors it most wants to attract, and the credibility of that pitch is built deal by deal and megawatt by megawatt, well before the industries it is meant to draw ever arrive.

Sources: Reuters