Boko’s employment reality sinks in
staff writer | Monday September 7, 2026 09:04
Instead, they chose to grapple with critical medicine shortages and an economy that is, by his own account, teetering on its knees.
'There are certain realities that confront you when you are in power. We did research as much as we could. You could do all the research and you still can't pick up certain issues. The practical truth is that this unequal economy, where growth has produced no jobs for many years and with coffers at P300 million from more than P37 billion three years ago you have to wrestle with keeping the ship afloat,' he said.
“That was the biggest existential challenge. Forget with jobs in the short term, you have to wrestle with keeping people alive, and making sure people get emoluments. That's what we had to wrestle with,' Boko stated.
Within the ruling party, there is growing disquiet over the slow pace at which campaign promises are being converted into visible relief, with insiders privately conceding that the messaging around jobs has shifted from delivery to damage control.
On the ground, the populace's patience is fraying in tandem, with the widening gap between promise and performance feeding a mounting sense of unease amongst a citizenry that had pinned considerable hope on swift economic renewal.
According to preliminary results from the 2024-25 Botswana Multi-Topic Household Survey (BMTHS), unemployment now stands at 21%, representing an increase of 3.4 percentage points from the 17.6% recorded in the last comparable survey conducted nearly a decade ago in 2015.
The increase is damning because both the labour force and employment levels have grown over the period. The problem, according to previous reports from the central bank, is that job creation has failed to keep pace with the growth in the number of people seeking work.
'While both the labour force and total employment expanded over the period, employment growth lagged labour force growth, resulting in persistently high unemployment,' the report states.
The Umbrella for Democratic Change's (UDC) rise to power was anchored on an 'Inclusive Growth, Quality Lives' manifesto ahead of the October 2024 General Election.
The party had promised a new economic strategy built around diversification, an annual growth rate above 10%, and average salaries lifted to P10,000 or more.
Central to the pitch of the messaging was the creation of 100,000 jobs within the first year of office, a figure Boko himself defended on the campaign trail as achievable because the manifesto was, in his telling, research based, with the party insisting its findings pointed to even higher numbers being possible.
The UDC also dangled a raft of complementary promises, amongst them tariff cuts on water and electricity, and a pledge to reopen the BCL Mine, all packaged as evidence that the coalition had done its homework on an economy it described as being in the grip of 'jobless growth.
But since assuming office, the economy has been mostly in contraction cycles, with the economy believed to be bleeding jobs rather than creating them.
At the centre of this slow economic environment has been a slowdown in diamond sales which has stalled government's ambitions to fulfill its mandate.
The prolonged downturn in the global diamond market has hollowed out the revenue base the state has leaned on for decades, dragging growth towards the bare one percent mark and helping push unemployment to the 28% level cited in the president's own remarks.
Previous data show that from a total of around one million Batswana who are eligible and actively seeking employment, almost a quarter cannot find footing in the local labour market, which is bloated and has no room for new entrants.
The figures are part of a larger trend which depicts a decades-old sting that has been biting away at the success story of Botswana's diamond-dependent economy.
According to figures from Statistics Botswana's Quarterly Multi-Topic Survey on labour, unemployment has been on an upward trajectory, quarter on quarter.
For instance, in 2019, the unemployment numbers stood at just a little under 200,000 but have since jumped up the ladder to the current 287,000.
Youth unemployment, meanwhile, has risen from 25.1% in 2015-16 to 28.9% in 2024-25, underscoring what the Bank of Botswana (BoB) describes as ongoing challenges in labour absorption and the need for employment-intensive growth. According to the first quarter 2024 survey, unemployment rose from 25.9% in the third quarter of 2023 to 27.6% in the first quarter of 2024. Youth unemployment increased even more sharply, climbing from 34.4% to 38.2%.
On paper, there were some positive developments with formal sector employment increasing by 2.9 percent to 504,738 workers.
However, the central bank cautioned that these gains were modest and most likely insufficient to offset broader labour market pressures.
Indeed, the report suggests the employment growth recorded at the time may already have disappeared.
'With the economy having contracted in 2024 and 2025, labour market conditions are likely to have deteriorated further in 2025.
'The slowdown in the diamond sector, a key driver of national output, export earnings and fiscal revenue, has had major spillover effects on mining-related industries and downstream services. As a result, the modest gains in formal sector employment observed in early 2024 may have since reversed,' BoB researchers observed.
It is against this backdrop that government has moved to rein in public spending, a decision that has been telegraphed for months amid a well-documented budget crisis.
Treasury officials have repeatedly flagged the shrinking diamond revenues as the single biggest threat to fiscal stability, and the slowdown in expenditure now under way is widely read as an attempt to stave off a deeper crisis rather than a deliberate policy choice.
For a government that rode into office on the strength of bold employment promises, the retreat marks a sobering recalibration.
Boko's own words suggest as much: survival, not job creation, has become the currency of the moment. Whether that trade-off will be tolerated by an increasingly restless electorate remains, for now, an open question.