Money – Capital & Investment · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026
Botswana has long owned the ground its minerals come from. A draft bill circulated in July 2024 asks a different question: who owns the companies that dig them up. The answer it proposes moves ownership from the resource to the firm, and from the state alone toward citizens, which is a meaningful shift in where the value of a mine is allowed to settle.
Under the draft, mining companies would be required to sell a 24% stake to citizens if the government declines to take up its own equity option, a structure reported by Reuters as a way to deepen domestic ownership of the sector. The state keeps first refusal; if it passes, the seat does not disappear, it moves to local hands. That sequencing is the heart of the design and the reason it reads as deliberate rather than blunt.
The Mechanism: A Backstop, Not Just a Mandate
The design detail matters. This is not a blanket nationalisation nor a simple quota. It is a conditional sequence: the government's equity option comes first, and the 24% citizen stake is the fallback if the state chooses not to exercise it. Ownership is engineered to stay domestic either way, while leaving the government room to decline a stake it does not want to fund or manage. The fallback ensures that a decision not to participate does not default the value back to foreign shareholders.
That structure tries to capture more of the value chain without scaring off the capital that builds mines in the first place. The stake is significant but short of control, which keeps the proposition closer to participation than to expropriation. For an investor weighing a Botswana project, the distinction is not cosmetic: a minority citizen stake is a cost and a partner to plan around, whereas the threat of losing control is a reason to walk away. The draft appears written to be lived with rather than feared.
The state keeps first claim on the equity, and citizens hold the backstop behind it.
The Stake: From Royalties to Ownership
Royalties and taxes capture value as it leaves the country. An equity stake captures it as ownership, with the upside and the risk that ownership carries. For Batswana, a 24% holding is a claim on the enterprise itself, not just a levy on what it ships. When the mine does well, the holder shares in the result; when it does not, the holder shares that too. That is a fuller, and a riskier, form of participation than a royalty, which pays regardless of whether the operation turns a profit.
It also changes the country's relationship to the commodity cycle. Royalties smooth income; equity amplifies it in both directions. A citizen-ownership model deepens the alignment between Batswana and the fortunes of the mines, which is a strength in good years and a shared exposure in bad ones. The draft, in effect, asks the country to take on more of the risk in exchange for more of the reward, a trade worth making only if the holders can carry the downside as well as the upside.
A royalty taxes the mineral; a stake makes you an owner of the mine.
The Open Question: Who Actually Holds the 24%
The hardest question the draft raises is not whether ownership moves home, but to whom. A 24% stake can become broad-based wealth, channelled through pooled or institutional vehicles that spread the benefit, or it can concentrate among those already positioned with the capital to buy in. The wording of any eventual law, and the mechanics of how citizens acquire and finance the stake, would decide which outcome materialises [TK]. The principle is settled in the draft; the distribution is not.
For operators and advisers, that is the detail to watch as the bill moves. The difference between a stake held widely and one held narrowly is the difference between a popular reform and a transfer that benefits few. Implementation, access to financing, valuation of the stake and governance of the citizen holding will matter more to the eventual result than the headline percentage. The number is fixed at 24; everything that decides what 24 means is still open.
The percentage is the easy part; who ends up holding it is the real policy.
The bill is a draft, and drafts change. But its premise is a clear statement of direction: that resource sovereignty in Botswana should be measured not only by what the ground yields, but by who sits on the share register when it does. Whether that register ends up broad or narrow is the next argument, and it is the one worth following.
Sources: Reuters
