Botswana’s high cannabis and hemp licensing fees, published in January this year, have provoked sharp criticism from local stakeholders who feel intentionally locked out of the market. Now, months after promising to review the licensing structure, the Government remains silent as to how it intends incorporating local farmers into the new cannabis sector.
2026/07/15 21:06
John Makoni, Africa Editor
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.
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