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Botswana holds the line as the rule of law recedes worldwide
Aubrey Lute（https://weekendpost.co.bw/author/alute/） 6 hours ago 284 15 min
A new global index finds authoritarian habits hardening across continents. Botswana is among the rare nations whose score ticked upward – even as some of its own civic freedoms quietly eroded.
In a year when the architecture of accountable government has continued to buckle under the weight of executive ambition, Botswana has done something that most of the world could not: it held its ground, and inched forward.
According to the 2026 WJP Rule of Law Index®, released on Wednesday by the World Justice Project, the long global recession in the rule of law shows no sign of lifting. Fewer countries slid backward this year than last, but the arithmetic of democratic health remains lopsided. Sixty-two percent of the 143 nations surveyed registered a decline – a majority still moving in the wrong direction, away from the checks, transparency, and guaranteed liberties that distinguish governance by law from governance by fiat.
Against that current, Botswana swam modestly upstream. Its overall score rose by less than one percent, a gain more symbolic than seismic, yet meaningful in a field where standing still is itself an achievement. The country now ranks 49th of 143 nations worldwide, and 4th of the 34 assessed across sub-Saharan Africa – placing it among the better-governed jurisdictions on a continent where the legal order has, in many places, frayed badly.
A region under strain
The regional picture is sobering. Rwanda leads sub-Saharan Africa, ranked 40th globally, trailed by Namibia and Mauritius. At the bottom sit Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan, the last of which placed 138th in the world – a ranking that reads less as a statistic than as an indictment of institutions hollowed out by conflict.
Twenty-three of the region’s 34 countries declined over the past year. More troubling still, 20 of those 23 had already declined the year before – evidence not of a stumble but of a slide, a sustained downward drift that is becoming the regional norm. Botswana’s steadiness, viewed in that context, is the exception that illuminates the rule.
Among the world’s 44 upper-middle-income countries, Botswana again ranks 4th, reinforcing its reputation as a jurisdiction that, for all its imperfections, continues to take the machinery of law seriously.
The entrenchment of authoritarian practice
The Index’s central finding is less a warning than a diagnosis. Authoritarianism, its authors conclude, is “no longer an emerging trend – it has become entrenched.” More than 86 percent of countries have endured a sustained five-year decline in at least one of the structural safeguards against arbitrary rule: constraints on government powers, open government, or fundamental rights.
Botswana is among them.
This is the uncomfortable corollary to the country’s rising score – the headline number concealing softer erosions beneath. The freedoms that animate civic life, that permit a citizen to speak, to gather, and to be heard, are contracting across most of the world, and Botswana has not been immune.
Freedom of opinion and expression declined in 64 percent of countries, Botswana included. Freedom of assembly and association fell in 67 percent, again including Botswana. Civic participation – the lifeblood of a functioning democracy – weakened in 65 percent of nations, with Botswana once more on the wrong side of the ledger.
These are not abstractions. In the grammar of the rule of law, they are the qualifying clauses that give the broader sentence its meaning. A state may keep its courts impartial and its corruption in check, yet still narrow the space in which its people may dissent – and in that narrowing lies the quiet logic of democratic backsliding.
Executive pressure and the courts
If a single culprit emerges from the 2026 Index, it is the long reach of the executive branch into domains meant to remain independent of it. Undue government pressure and interference have become, in the Index’s phrasing, “the leading drivers of institutional decay” across both criminal and civil systems.
Civil justice weakened in 64 percent of countries and criminal justice in 58 percent, with improper governmental influence identified as a central factor in each.