Six months after Botswana promulgated the Cannabis Act and Regulations 2025 on 12 January 2026, the country is no nearer to realising the emergence of an inclusive and fully transparent cannabis industry amid allegations of bureaucratic entanglement and an opaque and politically-manipulated licensing system.
The Act establishes and empowers a National Cannabis Control Authority (NCCA), tasked with overseeing licensing and coordinating legislative protocols. However, stakeholders say they are frustrated with the pace of progress and criticise the NCCA for not moving fast enough to get a viable cannabis industry up and running for the southern African country.
As of the moment, Cannabiz Africa knows of at least two entities that are pursuing or contemplating legal action after discussions with government stakeholders to review an exorbitant licensing structure and include poorer citizens broke down.
One entity, Cannabis Association of Botswana (CAB) has instructed its lawyers to file a statutory notice in its ongoing bid for formal recognition as an important stakeholder that deserves inclusion in the cannabis reform process. Another, Hemp Business Summit Co-founder and Inaugural Hemp Business Summit CEO Oratile Masala said his organisation had paused legal action after government agreed to review conditions surrounding licensing fees and broad-based industry participation.
“We are awaiting a pronouncement from the Ministry [of Lands and Agriculture] regarding the changes which they say they are gong o be bringing online. Once those changes are announced we will take it from there,” Masala told Cannabiz Africa on Tuesday, 14 July 2026.
“We had planned on taking legal action but before that we engaged the ministry to ask them to relax things in terms of the licensing requirements and possibly putting up capital. They had agreed that they would review the licensing and assured us that if we worked with associations they would ease things up a bit,” explained Masala.
The associations in question are ordinary smallholder farmer associations, which were supposed to be the vehicle for grassroots participation, following government assurance that ordinary Batswana would be included in the value chain. However, shortly after the regulations’ publication an outcry ensued with many accusing that government of reneging on its earlier promises of inclusivity. Critics have labelled the regulations as elitist and in favour of already established and politically-connected entities.
It is also Masala’s honest assessment that government directives are not being followed through at the implementing stakeholder level, stalling progress.
NCCA CEO Thapelo Leareng has not returned correspondence from Cannabiz Africa nor responded to a questionnaire requesting information such as the number of licences issued so far and whether
THC medicinal prescriptions were on the cards for Botswana. The questions were sent in early June shortly after Mr Leareng’s participation at the Cheeba Summit during Cannabis Expo 2026 from 29-31 May 2026 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Joburg.
Botswana has adopted a tiered licence fee structure which grades cannabis licence fees according to activity and investor category. The structure contains different price brackets for the entire value chain, from cultivation to manufacturing and exports and levies investors different fees, depending on whether they are citizens, are joint venture investors (that is non-citizens in partnership with citizens) or non-citizen/foreign investors.
However, some Batswana have accused government of presiding over an ownership model that encourages fronting rather than true local ownership.
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