Kutlo Motseta
23rd October 2025
The acting Chief Executive Officer(CEO) of Botswana’s ‘Gambling Authority’ Moruntshi Kemorwale, spoke at the ‘Botswana Mining Show’ about the national economic potential of gambling.
Moruntshi said Botswana should use regulated gambling to diversify the economy and shift its overreliance on the mining industry. Though Botswana reportedly has vast unmined minerals, Chief Operations Officer(COO) of Debswana Diamonds, Koolatotse Koolatotse, warned that Debswana diamonds will run out by 2069, which partly supports Moruntshi’s cautioning argument.
“It is possible that Gaborone can be completely reliant on the revenue of Gambling … these are conversations we should be having,” said Kemorwale.
He cited Las Vegas, Macau and Sun City as areas that have created economies within their countries.
“Gaborone’s budget can depend on daily [gambling] revenue. In this city there are five betting platforms … imagine if we recapture one half of the market that bets illegally, that would give us revenue to sustain 1 or 2 % of Gaborone’s [city council] budget.”
Though optimistic about gambling, Moruntshi said that they do not advocate for compulsive gambling, which damages homes and society.
“Legalised gambling … we are not saying we undertake licensed gambling at all costs, but we have safety standards … where we can safely collect from them, then we will do it,” he said.
Kemorwale said, “We are worried about the 3.4% [local] players being compulsive gamblers … we want to reduce this to 2%.”
He added that countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia have gambling compulsive problems as low as 0.2%, whilst some African countries figures stand at 20%.”
Moruntshi said it is plagued by problem of illegal gambling, which accounts for half of the gambling operations in Botswana (whilst the America’s illegal gambling problem stands at one third).
“We are working with BOCRA to block them but it not easy. You block them and they are operating the next day or a few bours later … we use enforcement agencies like the police … in Pilane we confiscated from illegal gambling service providers … we use AI systems to prevent illegal gambling,” said Kemorwale.
The Gambling Authority contracts registered counsellors to provide free counselling for compulsive gamblers. Mr Moruntshi said the provision of counselling by regulators is not a universal practise and is one if the reasons why the authority has been ranked as the leading authority in Africa and part of the reason why many countries come to Botswana to benchmark their gambling practises.
Kemorwale said the authority has corporate social responsibility academic programs and has sponsored several PhD and Masters students who are researching the gambling industry.
