Across Botswana, the lines of patients outside government clinics are lengthening, construction companies dependent on state jobs are firing workers and university students are threatening to boycott lectures after not getting the allowance increases they were promised.
The economic slowdown is a sharp reversal from just a few years ago when the world’s richest diamond deposits allowed the sparsely-populated desert nation of 2.5 million people to invest in free and efficient health care and plow money into funding tertiary education for students both at home and abroad. Its robust finances allowed it to provide for its citizens in a way that made it the envy of southern Africa.
The discovery of gems in 1967 transformed what was a rural backwater with, at the time of independence from the U.K. a year earlier, only a few miles of tarred road into the richest nation per capita on the sub-Saharan African mainland. Six decades later, a diamond-market crisis has turned that find into an affliction and a cautionary tale of what can happen to an economy that becomes overly reliant on one commodity.
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