Economics – Industry & Resources · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026
The standard story of Botswana's economy is a diamond story, which makes a flat year for mining a useful stress test of how much else there is. In March 2023, finance-ministry officials forecast that mining growth would be flat for the year as diamond demand softened, with copper and coal expected to take up some, though not all, of the slack. A flat number is rarely a headline, but in an economy this concentrated it is a diagnostic reading of how far the base has actually widened.
Flat is not a crisis, but for an economy where mineral output drives the budget and the external accounts, a stalled mining sector is a signal worth reading closely. It exposes how dependent the headline number still is on a single category of stone, and how far the substitutes have come. The same forecast that says diamonds are soft also says the sector will not contract, and the gap between those two statements is precisely the diversification story playing out in the data.
The Forecast: Flat for 2023
The flat-growth projection was reported by Reuters in March 2023, attributed to weakening diamond demand. In an economy where diamonds dominate mining and mining dominates exports, a soft year for the stones tends to pull the whole sector toward zero growth unless something else rises to meet it. The mechanism is simple arithmetic: when the largest component of a sector stalls, the sector stalls with it unless the smaller components grow fast enough to compensate.
The candour of the forecast matters. Naming a flat year in advance is a planning input for the fiscus, allowing the budget to be set against realistic mineral revenue rather than optimistic assumptions. For a government that funds public services and underwrites the Pula's stability through mineral income, the value of an early, honest forecast is that it shortens the gap between what is expected and what is planned for.
A flat forecast named early is a budget protected early.
The Offset: Copper and Coal Step Up
The reason 2023 was expected to be flat rather than negative is the rise of copper and coal. Both were projected to grow on the back of global demand, partly cushioning the softness in diamonds. This is the diversification thesis showing up in the data: when one mineral dips, others lift, and the sector as a whole holds rather than falls. A decade earlier, a soft diamond year would have had little to offset it; the presence of two growing minerals is itself the structural change.
The offset is partial, not complete. Copper and coal are growing from a smaller base than diamonds occupy, so their gains soften the diamond weakness without erasing it. The direction is encouraging; the scale is not yet decisive. The distinction matters for how the result is read. A sector that holds flat because two minerals offset a third is more resilient than one that simply rises and falls with a single stone, even when the headline number is unchanged.
Copper and coal cushion the fall; they do not yet carry the load.
The Operator's Read: Resilience Hides Behind a Flat Line
For businesses that supply or serve the mining sector, a flat headline can be misleading. Beneath it sits a reallocation: diamond-linked activity softening while copper and coal operations expand. Suppliers, contractors and service firms positioned toward the growing minerals face a different year from those tied to diamonds, even though the aggregate barely moves. The flat line is an average of divergent trends, and the divergence is where the opportunity and the risk both sit.
The strategic takeaway for operators is to read the composition, not just the total. A mining sector that holds flat by rotating from a stalling mineral into rising ones is quietly rebuilding its foundations. The firms that track that rotation, rather than the headline, are the ones positioned for where the activity is actually moving.
Read the composition; the headline hides the rotation.
A flat mining year tells Botswana something its strongest years obscure: the base is widening but the diamond remains the centre of gravity. Copper and coal can absorb a soft patch in diamond demand, which is new and meaningful, and the firms attached to them feel a different year from the headline. Whether those minerals can one day replace rather than merely offset the diamond is the longer test, and a single flat year is only the first reading of it.
Sources: Reuters
