Death or silence: this was the choice facing David Magang.
We are sitting with the former minister over a cup of coffee at the Phakalane Hotel and Resort. He is regaling us with stories of how he was warned that there was probably a bullet with his name somewhere out there.
Magang had barely stepped down from the podium during the 1997 Financial Times Diamond Conference in London when Israeli journalist and diamond expert Chaim Even Zohar pulled him to the side and warned him against taking on De Beers. “The diamond mafia will bump you off, yes that is the word he used, bump you off” recalls Magang.
It’s the morning of Thursday November 14th. The former Minister of Mineral Resources and Water Affairs is still in one piece although much older. His mission to bring diamond cutting, polishing and jewelry manufacturing to Botswana has been entirely successful, but not perhaps in the way his younger self had envisaged. De Beers is on its third day of the historic inaugural rough diamond sales to international sight holders in Gaborone. Around 200 representatives of the world’s leading diamantaires are due to attend the sight at the De Beers offices. From the safe distance of 16 years, Magang throws back his head and chortles as he recalls: “Everyone said I was mad.”
By everyone, he is referring to former President Sir Ketumile Masire, his successor former President Festus Mogae, cabinet colleagues, members of parliament and a legion of journalists who reported on the diamond industry. His insanity was deciding to embark on a one man crusade for diamond beneficiation. To local politicians and journalists who had been sold on to the De Beers lie that diamonds could not be cut and polished profitably in Botswana, Magang’s campaign was dismissed as the rumblings of a mad man. To colleagues and international journalists privy to the murky world of diamond deals, the former minister was mad to think he could take on De Beers and emerge unscathed.
In his autobiography, The Magic of Perseverance, Magang recalls that when he was removed from the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Water Affairs, “ to most of my well wishers my transfer was secondary; it was the fact that I was still in one piece, given my forthright candid view over De Beers vis-a- vis Botswana diamonds that gladdened them. Zohar confessed to me that much as he lauded my courage and chutzpah in taking on De Beers, he was haunted by the peril that I was inviting in the process. Another sympathyser, Jack Lunzer, spoke of the wickedness of the De Beers People’, like Zohar, he observed that he had always struggled to ward off the presentiment that they would one day neutralise me.”
Magang recalls that the diamond racket was pervaded with sleaze, fear and loathing. This “was vividly encapsulated by Victor Sibiya, who was the CEO of the Diamond Board of South Africa. Sibiya confided to me in May 1998 that he was unlikely to stay long on the Board, as he knew too much about the shady goings on in the industry and feared for his life.”
Like the famous lone protester in Tiananmen Square, halting a column of tanks with nothing more than his hopelessly vulnerable body, Magang placed himself and his reputation – in the path of the juggernaut that everyone believed could not be stopped by a lone crusader. And he had no illusions about what De Beers was capable of. He was a young lawyer going about his work when he had his first run in with De Beers. “It was an eye opener,” the bespectacled businessman daintily turned out in a blue suit and white shirt recalls.
“In 1978 I was approached by a client, Hernie Smuts, who had two diamond beneficiation plants in Johannesburg. One factory was for big diamonds cut by whites and the other was for small stones cut by coloureds. He asked me to apply for a diamond polishing licence in Botswana on his behalf.”
The young lawyer did not know where to start. Nothing like that had ever been done in Botswana before. He spent the next few days preparing a presentation about how the project would create jobs and down-stream industries for Botswana. He attached the presentation to the application letter and made an appointment to see the then minister of Mineral Resources and Water Affairs, Dr Gaositwe Chiepe.
Magang chuckles in between sips of steaming coffee as he recalls the minister’s reaction when he introduced Smuts and explained the purpose of their visit. A goggle eyed Dr Chiepe asked: “Does this man come from De Beers?”
A few days later, Magang was talking to a frantic voice on the other end of the phone. It was Smuts, pleading with him to drop the application. Smuts had received a phone call from the South African minister of mines saying De Beers had complained to him that Smuts was stepping on their toes in Botswana by applying for a diamond cutting license. “If you go ahead with the application De Beers may stop selling to me and ruin my business,” Smuts explained to Magang.
The application failed. The incident, however, was to shape Magang’s politics and give him an idea of the animal he was dealing with. He recalls that it has been a one man and “terribly lonely” fight on behalf of Batswana, with no support from government, not from former president Sir Ketumile Masire, not from Festus Mogae who Magang counts as one of his friends and not even from the opposition benches.
From 1979 when he was elected Member of Parliament for Lentswe-le-Tau until he quit active politics, Magang became the lone voice of beneficiation and De Beers’ biggest adversary in both parliament and government.
The balding sexagenarian enjoying his morning cup of coffee is almost transformed into a twenty-something bookworm as he recalls how he stayed up two nights at university, reading a thick volume of Fidel Castro’s speech.
The bearded Cuban firebrand was condemning the first world’s exploitation of developing countries. Castro argued that as a young peasant boy, his family had to raise one hundred bushels of wheat to buy a tractor. “Twenty five years later not even a thousand bushels can buy a tractor yet we still till the same plot of land.”
Magang felt that Castro’s illustration was instructive. He squirmed as he watched Botswana going down the route of Cuban peasants. “Of course, we are Africans. Africans are loath to process their own products. We prefer to export cheap and import expensively,” Magang says as a matter of fact. He, however, was not about to stand aside and watch as Botswana was being parceled out to foreigners.
Besides gangs of diamond smugglers, very few Batswana could claim to have their hands on the pulse of the diamond industry.
Not surprising, Magang had his first lesson of diamonds from criminals. He was preparing a defence for his clients who were facing charges of diamond smuggling when he asked them how they were able to tell diamonds from broken pieces of glasses: “Just pop it in your mouth, run it against your tongue and it feels different from glass,” one responded. Despite the country’s huge diamond resources, most Batswana saw their future in cattle. Come Friday, senior civil servants and big businessmen loaded their 4×4 trucks and headed for the cattle post. Almost everyone who had money invested it in cattle. Magang and his colleague, Patrick Balopi, then Member of Parliament for Francistown, saw a huge business opportunity in leather beneficiation. The result was Pilane Tannery in Pilane and an associate shoe manufacturing company in Gaborone which employed hundreds of Batswana.
One morning, he received a brown envelope with a letter ordering closure of the tannery. Authorities complained of the pungent smell coming from the hides which were being tanned. Hundreds of his employees were thrown onto the streets and their jobs were exported with the hides to other countries.
Still smarting from the incident, in 1982, Magang penned his first pamphlet on beneficiation. “I did not write about diamonds because they were taboo”. Instead, he wrote about leather industry beneficiation. More than three decades later, government is finally coming around to Magang’s leather beneficiation campaign. The Botswana Export Development Investment Agency (BEDIA) is currently trolling for investors who can set up tanneries in the country. He laughs at the idea.
With his tannery and shoe factory now under lock and key, Magang did not let up on championing beneficiation. His focus was on diamonds. Magang had his second clash with De Beers. The South African mining giant argued that Botswana’s high labour costs priced the country out of profitable beneficiation in the diamond industry.“For over 20 years, I ploughed a lonely furrow in my untiring agitation for diamond beneficiation. No president, vice president, minister, MP, permanent secretary, Debswana MD or De Beers’ official took me seriously. If my colleagues in the executive and legislature had lent at least half an ear, one wonders where Botswana would be today”, he says.
In his autobiography, Magang quotes a 2007 Diamond Intelligence Briefs article saying “the writer underscored the impregnability of the obstacles I had faced in the nineties when he wrote: “Historically, De Beers ÔÇô in collusion with the government ÔÇô had made it clear that it was not possible to profitably produce in Botswana. One official bluntly said that the two token but large manufacturing companies that had been operating for a long time (one of which was owned by De Beers with Gareth Penny as its first factory manager in the early 1990s) had been told “not to report profits.” Doing otherwise would have contradicted the formal position of the rough producers.”
The journalist was referring to previous attempts to embark on diamond-cutting and polishing in Botswana, “but these had been quietly sabotaged”, recalls Magang. The three companies had to source their supplies from CSO in London. The first to be established was Diamond Manufacturing Botswana (DMB). Set up in 1982, DMB was a joint venture between a Belgian based company, Mabrodium and the Botswana government. Government had a 15% stake in the company, but the diamonds the cut and polished were from DRC called coated diamonds. The venture was a prototypical failure; “DMB showed no profit for 15 years; it actually polished diamonds on a commission basis on behalf of its Belgian ÔÇô based mother company, Mabrodium. Intriguingly, no one ever bothered to get to the bottom of why it was not profitable, when some of its board members were civil servants. Clearly there was a conspiracy to showcase it as a failure and therefore lend credence to the De Beers’ line that this kind of business was certainly not viable in Botswana; for the same company, which is now under new ownership and management, is today able to turn a profit” argues Magang.
Recalls Magang: “The Serowe ÔÇô based Teemane Manufacturing Company (TMC) was nothing other than De Beers’ farcical attempt at demonstrating that it was somehow keen on a semblance of beneficiation. That De Beers was simply making a show of it was evidenced by its subsidization of TMC to the tune of one million pula a year through Debswana. Moreover, the diamonds that TMC was cutting and polishing were supplied to it through the CSO in London, when the contract provided for Debswana to supply local cutters directly as well.
He says unlike TMC, the Molepolole-based Lazare Kaplan Botswana (LKB) was independent from De Beers and was a partnership with Botswana Development Corporation. The monopoly-obsessed De Beers did not take kindly to being on the sidelines of a Botswana based operation that processed Botswana diamonds and so did their utmost to have LKB derailed. According to reports, their two pronged strategy was to supply LKB with inappropriate diamonds or, where they relented, deliver decent stones, but far short of the quantities required. “I met De Beers’ officials on several occasions to find out exactly why they were keeping LKB short of diamonds or supplying them with inappropriate stones. As always, they were as subtly evasive as to say nothing. In one such meeting in Johannesburg, Peter Gush and Julian Ogilvie-Thompson tried to skirt the objective of our meeting by proposing that if LKB was failing to make ends meet, De Beers was prepared to subsidise it with cash in order to maintain employment, just as it had TMC in Serowe. For its part LKB was under no illusion as to what De Beers were up to. In fact, De Beers had given them the virtual ultimatum that they had better kowtow to a buy-out or continue to wallow in endless woe. Neither LKB nor I were keen on lending our blessings to such a move, as De Beers would manipulate circumstances to justify their stance that a diamond cutting and polishing venture was not viable”, says Magang.
With all local cutting plants turning in losses, Magang’s lone voice was drowned by the “cutting is not viable in Botswana” chorus. De Beers were vindicated and Magang was caricatured as a mad minister who had lost the plot.
“De Beers had obviously convinced our political leadership that producing countries ought not to be processing at the same time. My counter to that was that how it is that Russia is doing it profitably, ultimately Angola and Namibia?”
South Africa on the other hand had a law that no diamond mined from the country could be exported until the local market had been satisfied. An extra export tax was levied if diamonds were exported from South Africa.
As a minister, Magang tried to sell beneficiation to Cabinet, but there were no buyers. The then President Sir Ketumile Masire and his deputy Festus Mogae had swallowed the De Beers lies line hook and sinker and “ were in no mood to establish a cutting and polishing industry in Botswana. I had no support from top to bottom, however much I tried. My President and Vice President thought I was mad.
Magang tried to persuade government that at least five to ten percent of Botswana diamonds should be sold on the open market to test and gauge the true market price of our diamonds. “I was concerned that we were the only country in the world who sold 100 percent of our output to the CSO in Russia, for instance, there was a provision that 20 per cent should be sold openly in the local market and that 50 per cent of this should go to local cutters and polishers. In South Africa, the government insisted that good quality, cut-able diamonds should first be offered to the local market and only the quantity that was surplus should be sold elsewhere.” A diamond expert, Jack Lunzer explained the five per cent window for marketing to President Masire who was quite receptive. “Lo and behold, two hours later Harry Oppenheimer and Julian Ogilvy-Thompson arrived in Gaborone in their jet followed by Nicky Oppenheimer piloting his helicopter. They were driven straight to the State House and all subsequent talks of the five per cent died a natural death” recalls Magang.
At the time, I felt terribly lonely. Very few Batswana knew about diamonds. It was me, the President, the Vice President, the Attorney General, Minister of Finance and their officials. These were key ministers involved in negotiations with De Beers. We were supposed to be the leading diamond producer in the world. It made sense that we should understand diamonds just as we understand cattle. But De Beers had deliberately kept Batswana in the dark.”
Magang became the Cabinet laughing stock. “I was the butt of Cabinet jokes when discussions turned to diamonds. Mogae used to laugh saying that at least I had been consistent for years in my beneficiation campaign.”
Magang was almost broken. One day, in a fit of frustration he walked into De Beers offices in Johannesburg and started railing about how De Beers had deliberately designed to keep Batswana ignorant about the diamond industry. He pointed out that in the 25 years that De Beers had been operating in Botswana; it had not trained a single citizen on the workings of the diamond industry.
The first Motswana who was ever exposed to the goings on in the industry was Blackie Marole who was recruited as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Mineral Resources to join De Beers, raising a lot of eye brows among De Beers’ critics. Marole later became Debswana Managing Director.
Magang then decided to grow his support base by exposing as many Batswana parliamentarians as possible to the workings of the diamond industry. First he proposed to send a team of MPs to diamond cutting factories in India at government’s expense. By his account, De Beers would not let him.
Instead De Beers insisted on paying for the MPs India visit. The MPs were taken on a tour of India’s diamond cutting sweat shops where they saw cutters tied to stakes and exposed to deplorable working conditions. When they came back, they jumped onto the De Beers band wagon that cutting was not viable in Botswana.
Magang then decided to send another group including his then Permanent Secretary Blackie Marole, government sorter Todd Majaye and Deputy Attorney General Ian Kirby. “Again De Beers took them over and Nchindo insisted on accompanying Marole.”
When he is on song, Majaye likes to talk about how they were plied with strong alcohol, kept up until late at night and chaperoned by De Beers guides. When the second group came back they penned a joint report with De Beers also arguing that cutting was not viable in Botswana.
Magang saw through it all. He insisted that each of the delegates should write own individual report. All the three came up with reports that beneficiation could be made viable in Botswana.
Majaye later fell out with Debswana and was fired under questionable circumstances. He became a leading Magang supporter. After sometime, Magang decided to send Daniel Kwelagobe, an outspoken cabinet minister who at times was given to supporting the beneficiation campaign. “When Kwelagobe came back, he was buddy buddy with Nchindo and cut adrift of the campaign, and I thought, that’s it! He is lost to the campaign.”
Magang then decided to send Botswana National Front MPs, hopeful that they would support his campaign seeing that the BNF was also making all the right noise about beneficiation. This time De Beers, again, took over Michael Dingake and Otlaadisa Koosaletse. About the same time, De Beers was jittery that Botswana’s political sands were shifting. The BNF had returned 14 MPs in the last election and its star was rising. De Beers decided to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds. While they were trying to open negotiations with BNF, they also secretly sponsored a consultant from the University of Natal, Lawrence Schlemmer to help the ruling Botswana Democratic Party’s chances of winning the elections.
Their cover was ultimately broken when one of Schlemmer’s aides tried to rob the project’s research assistants out of their money. The pay dispute ended at the Central Police Station in Gaborone where the De Beers’ name kept coming up. A few days after De Beers’ first and only meeting with BNF President Dr Kenneth Koma and his confidante Michael Mothobi, the mining company went behind the duos back and sponsored the trip by BNF Vice President Michael Dingake and MP Otlaadisa Koosaletse.
This came at a time when relations between Koma and his supporters on the one hand and Dingake and his followers on the other were strained. When Dingake and Koosaletse came back their relations with Koma and his followers had broken down irreparably. A few months later Dingake, Koosaletse and most BNF parliamentarians broke away to form the Botswana Congress Party, and the De Beers’ name was again bandied about.
As it turned out, Koosaletse and Dingake never joined the beneficiation campaign. “Instead I heard that one of them got a De Beers scholarship for his child,” recalls Magang.
Magang may have finally accomplished his mission, but it came at a great cost; the presidency of Botswana. A number of politicians who were privy to former President Mogae’s decision to make Khama his deputy see De Beers’ hand in the last minute decision to ditch Magang.
The then Chairperson of the Botswana National Front (BNF) Parliamentary Caucus Otlaadisa Koosaletse remembers that the party had agreed to endorse Magang as Mogae’s deputy. The morning the decision was to be made, Mogae called him to a cluttered and cheerless office next to the members lounge in Parliament. Mogae was a worried man.
He could not count on his divided party to endorse his choice of Vice President and was lobbying the BNF parliamentary caucus for support. “Mogae told me not to listen to all the rumours swirling in the parliament corridors,” recalls Koosaletse. The president-in-waiting then asked Koosaletse to promise that the BNF parliamentary caucus would support his choice of Vice President. Koosaletse had no problem with the request. After all, he knew that Mogae’s choice was Magang. Koosaletse knew very well that Mogae and Magang had a long-standing personal friendship and he had no reason to suspect Mogae was about to betray his boyhood friend.
Next on Mogae’s lobby list was BNF Vice President Michael Dingake. As Dingake recalls, the president-in-waiting ranged through the lobby like a moving target. “He told me that ‘give every man thy ear but few thy voice’”. Dingake did not know what to make of the wisecrack from the pages of William Shakespeare’s classic “Hamlet.” Dingake made no commitment, but like Koosaletse, was sure that Mogae’s choice for Vice President was Magang.
After the meeting with Dingake, Mogae then called in Koma, the BNF President. In the best tradition of Botswana’s vice presidential campaigns, the next phase of Mogae’s lobby remains obscure. The BNF’s best-laid plans to make Magang Vice President went off the rails. Both Dingake and Koosaletse say they do not know exactly what transpired between Koma and Mogae in the small office next to the parliament lounge. Somewhere in the fog, perhaps there was a double cross. Certainly there was a change in plans, and a new name officially entered the contest for the Vice Presidency.
Recalls Koosaletse: “When Koma emerged from the meeting, he told us that Mogae had proposed Ian Khama’s name for the Vice Presidency. We were shocked and we looked at each other. That was not what we had agreed at the BNF. We asked Koma what he told Mogae. Maitshwarelo Dabutha was particularly hard on Koma, demanding to know what concessions Koma made and what he expected in return. Koma told us that he promised to support Mogae’s choice because Mogae promised to agree to our proposal for the funding of opposition parties in return.”
According to Koosaletse and Dingake, an altercation ensued and Koma ducked out by calling his guide, Tilman Pilane, to take him home so that he could take his medication. At the time, the BNF was going through its own entirely different crisis. Dingake and ten other BNF parliamentarians were in one faction while Koma and Kebadire Kalake were in the other faction. The impasse was never resolved but called on the BNF to support different personalities for the Vice Presidency, adding to the Front’s tension.
“Khama’s name came as a complete shock to us. So we called in the Attorney General, Phandu Skelemani, to explain if that was possible,” recalls Koosaletse. Skelemani was convinced Dingake and Koosaletse had gone off their rocker. He just looked at them and said, “Ian Khama! Vice President! Muno penga (Ian Khama! Vice President! Are you guys are crazy.),” replied the flamboyant former government chief lawyer in Kalanga. Skelemani clearly did not take the BNF fears that Khama could become Vice President seriously.
A consultancy report by Professor Lawrence Schlemmer commissioned and paid for by De Beers recommended that to heal the BDP rift and shore up the party’s fortunes in the next elections, Mogae would have to appoint someone with a strong character who has not been tainted by the BDP factionalism from outside the party structures. Besides, De Beers had a problem with Magang who had been fighting with the diamond mining giant over diamond beneficiation. There was also talk of nocturnal meetings between Mogae, former Debswana Managing Director Louis Nchindo and the then Botswana Defence Force commander, Lt Gen Ian Khama, at Nchindo’s place in the suburbs of Gaborone Central.
Instead of being appointed vice president, Magang was moved from the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Water Affairs to the Ministry of Works Transport and Communications. Magang says he was not shocked by the turn of events.
“To be honest, my redeployment was not exactly a bolt a bolt from out of the blue; I had intercepted a fair amount of talk regarding it. To some well placed people, in fact it was not a matter of why or when; it was a matter of whether I would live to be redeployed. For instance Chaim Even Zohar, editor of a diamond magazine, told me that he knew as early as February that I would be shunted to another ministry when Mogae took the helm”, recalls Magang.
He says it was not his business “to wrench a disclosure of unalloyed facts from Mogae. As a long-standing friend, I could have exercised a little bit of freedom to press for particulars, but I stifled the urge. Besides, over the years we had been imperceptibly drifting apart, which is typical of people as they advance in age, and the pressure of work, compounded by the constrictions of officialdom, had played their part. In any case, the odds that Mogae would have owned up to the absolute truth were naught. Certainly, I did not expect him to say, “ you see my old friend, I m plucking you from mineral affairs because you have been a thorn on the side of De Beers from the day you took office and I fear you may occasion irreparable strain in our relations.
