What makes a country rich and successful

 Let’s say you’re just a random African dude and you’ve been elected the President of an African country that recently gained independence from Great Britain. Your country is the third poorest in the world. You have only 12 miles of paved roads, you have only one hundred high school graduates in a country of half a million, the disease is rampant, there’s been a drought for two years, and you even rely on your previous colonizer to make sure your government doesn’t instantly run out of money. You’d like to make this better, and other countries in the region have made real progress in helping their citizens before, but they’ve come at the expense of human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and general freedom. You’d like to make sure your population can have both a good standard of living while also having social and political rights. Here’s how you’d go about doing that. You should first take stock of what your country can offer. What have you got? Cattle farming Vast wilderness Mineral deposits but with no tools to get Anything else? That’s it? Seriously? 

Okay, so the mines. You take out a big fat loan from the International Monetary Fund and use it to finally get the tools to crack at your vast mining deposits. With that, you can export it to the western world and use the money to pay off your loan as well as keep your government running smoothly. Wait wait wait, running the government? Everyone is uneducated and unskilled. Who will run the country? Ah, right, well, the-uh British! Yes!  So with the mining rigs up and running, you can sell the minerals to the rest of the world, becoming an export-focused economy. You would personally negotiate a trade deal with the European Economic Community so you can start importing and exporting goods freely. The revenue from these trades you use to invest in health and education. With a public/private ownership model of mining corporations, 50% of your government revenue comes from the mining industry and this allows you to keep taxes low and even raise more money than you need to spend. That means bountiful dividends to the public and heavy investment from foreign companies. It also means you can ditch the South African rand and set up your central bank to use your currency. By now, you have the fastest growing economy in the world. 

That means subsidies to farmers, vaccinations against diseases, universal education, universal healthcare, airports, contraception, telephones, technology, slippers. At the same time, civil rights and the rule of law are still being protected. Because you’re still using the 1966 constitution drawn up by the British, it means you still have to respect the rule of law, and that means free and fair elections. So in 1969, Botswana held its second presidential election since independence. Unsurprisingly, you’re re-elected with nearly 70% of the vote, and again in 1974, with an even higher percentage of the vote. Again, in a completely legitimate election. For context, the last time a Western The leader was elected in a fair election with over 70% of the vote was in. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, however, as all-around your country, you are surrounded by the racist regimes of Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa. They don’t like the fact you, a black man, are -shockingly- running a country and get this, doing it well. Also, your wife is white, a big no-no for racists. But now Rhodesian and South African-backed terror groups are targeting you and commencing operations in your borders, so you form the Botswana Defense Force in 1977 to keep them at bay.

You also play a role in founding the Southern African Development Community, as a way for the wider Southern African community to reduce their reliance on South Africa and Rhodesia. In 2019, this region had a nominal GDP slightly bigger than Switzerland. In 1979, you are elected a fourth time, with 75% of the votes. Unfortunately, you die in office only a few months later and your Vice President takes over. But he’s just as popular as you, and to this day your party has consistently been re-elected every election. Since you became President, there has not been a single military coup, major rebellion, or civil unrest because you made sure civil liberties and the welfare state were protected. With a proper education system, 90% of your citizens can get an education up to age 13 at the very least. In the past 20 years, Infant mortality is down 16%, tuberculosis is down 76%, STDs are down by two-thirds, malnutrition is down by a quarter. In just thirteen years, the wealth of your citizens increased ten thousand percent. Not bad, about some of the other countries in the area. Today, your country ranks the lowest in Africa for corruption and instability and even has accumulated over $7 billion in foreign currency reserves. Over 270,000 tourists visit yearly, despite the 2014 ban on poaching and game hunting. 

In 2019, the government scrapped a law making same-sex relationships illegal, one of the first in Africa to do so. That’s not to say your country is now a utopia though; nepotism, unemployment, over-reliance on mining, erosion of free speech, as well as a huge AIDS crisis have been plaguing your country in recent times, but with an educated and open-minded population, you should be confident that these are all problems that can be overcome. 1. Work creatively with your natural resources. 2. Be practical instead of ideological. 3. Uphold civil liberties and the rule of law.