Botswana's new president is a human rights lawyer on a mission

Few places are as different as the country where Duma Boko was born in 1969 and the one where he became president last November.

He began life in one of the poorest nations on Earth, which had two dozen university graduates and seven miles of paved roads.  Five decades later, the former human rights lawyer leads one of Africa's most prosperous states, lauded for bucking what's known as the "resource curse" and using its diamond deposits to vastly reduce poverty.

The southern African nation's staggering transformation with the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), which led the country uninterrupted for the first 58 years of its history.

But the ascent of Mr. Boko, a charismatic orator with a flair for promising to defend downtrodden people, reveals the cracks in Botswana's rags-to-riches story.  While lauded for its economic boom and political stability, Botswana is also one the world's most unequal countries.  In recent years, as diamond prices have sputtered and the BDP government has repeatedly been caught up in major corruption scandals, Botswana's youthful electorate has begun to search for alternatives to the party of their elders.

They found one in Mr. Boko, who has pledged to distribute the country's wealth more equally and end its over-reliance on diamonds.  "There is no powerful guy, here; together we are powerful," he said shortly after his election.

Mr. Boko's personal story, in many ways, marches in step with that of Botswana's.

The son of a schoolteacher, he was born in a village called Mahalapyre in 1969, just three years after Botswana's independence from Britain.

At the time, the vast majority of citizens of the sparsely populated, arid country were illiterate, and the government relied on British aid for almost half of its budget.  But Botswana's first president, an Oxford-educated member of a local royal family named Seretse Khama, had a vision for a way out.

He invited the mining magnate De Beers to scour the country for diamonds, and when it found them the year after independence, he struck a deal giving Botswana's government a 50% stake in the company's local operations.  By the 1980s, Botswana was one of the world's top diamond producers, with a corresponding high rate of economic growth.

Mr. Boko grew up against the backdrop of this social revolution, a studious child with a sensitive moral compass.  "He was so fixated on doing the right thing," his cousin Nomsa Gosenyaphuti told a local news outlet before the election.  She recalls that other children called him Rra Melao, or Mr. Laws.

Mr. Boko's interest in justice pushed him to pursue law, first on a government scholarship at the University of Botswana and later at Harvard.  For several years, he ran a law firm in Botswana, that took on many human rights cases.

In 2008, Mr Boko gained national acclaim as part of the legal team that won a landmark case allowing the San, a traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherer group, to stay on land the government had earmarked for tourism and mining.

Mr. Boko's experience with human rights eventually inspired him to go into politics, he explained to his biographer, Richard Khumoelae (through his press officer, Mr. Boko declined an interview for this story).

In 2014, he became the leader of the Botswana National Front (BNF), the country's main opposition party.

GROWING DISCONTENT

As leader of the BNF, Mr. Boko ran unsuccessfully for president twice, in 2014 and 2019. But in 2024, the electorate--like that of dozens of countries that went to the polls last year--was fed up with how its leadership had handled the faltering economy.

In Botswana, as in nearby South Africa and Mozambique, voters were beginning to sour on the party of their liberation.

For a long time, "It was entrenched in our minds that the BDP was the first democratically elected party, so we should go with it all the time," says Balestse Taukobong, a business man and long-time BDP voter. This election, though, he cast his ballot for Mr. Boko and BNF.

Mr. Boko rode the wave of discontent and on Oct. 30, voters handed him a landslide mandate to the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), a coalition made up of BNF and three other parties.  Combined, they won 36 of the country's 61 elected parliamentary seats.  The BDP, meanwhile, took just four.

THE ROAD AHEAD

In a country where political leadership long left unchangeable, Mr. Boko's victory has inspired widespread excitement.  Months after the election, that energy still fizzes in the capital, Gaborone, where it is common to see people sporting T-shirts handed out on the campaign trails emblazoned with Mr. Boko's beaming face.  "On some days, I wash my UDC T-shirt in the evening, hang it to dry overnight, and wear it in the morning," says Thapelo Kegakile, a taxi owner and driver.

However, Mr. Boko is unlikely to be able to ride this Barack Obama-like wave of excitement forever.

"He has his work cut for him," says David Sebudubudu, a professor of political science at the University of Botswana. "He has to tread carefully to avoid overpromising and underdelivering."

Among other things, Mr. Boko has pledged to increase social grants to new mothers, pensioners, and people with disabilities, and to increase minimum wage.

But much of his ability to make good on his promises depends on the precious stones buried beneath Botswana's scrubby grasslands.

Diamond sales still account for 80% of the country's exports, a situation that has become increasingly precarious as the stone's price has faltered in recent years.  Mr. Boko has promised to diversify the economy, suggesting, among other things, that Botswana legalize marijuana and hemp production.

"I can only pledge  to (the people) that I will do my very best," he stated in his first comments to the media after taking office.  "Where I fail and fault, I will look to them for guidance."

The Christian Science Monitor Weekly / Week of February 17, 2025