It has all the ingredients of a fast-moving thriller. A secret deal to buy a sitting president out of power; a plot hatched to trick government officials into a questionable multi-million dollar deal and worse.
Except this is not a tale from the underworld of Mafiosi cloak and dagger intrigues, but a snapshot of the relationship between De Beers and the Botswana government over the past two decades.
The murky relationship has now come to haunt both the Botswana government and De Beers as they huddle around the table to negotiate a new sales agreement.
“These negotiations are the most critical in the history of the partnership between De Beers and Botswana Government. The negotiations are taking place following media revelations implicating the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) and De Beers in what amounted to conflict of interest, corruption, secret funding of political formations and manipulation of the democratic process,” says a press statement faxed to local media houses by the Botswana Congress Party (BCP) Secretary General Dr Kesitegile Gobotswang.
The BCP leader is raising the issue on every Motswana’s lips. Most Batswana have a De Beers story. From former cabinet ministers and government officials, who were treated to a peep show of the questionable goings on, to researchers and ordinary citizens who read it all in the media, there are myths and mysteries and misapprehensions about the relationship between De Beers and the Botswana government.
The BCP statement points out that, “although Botswana contributes 67 percent of De Beers diamonds and 25 percent of the total global rough diamonds the country only receives a paltry 0.03 percent of total revenue accrued from global diamond sales.”
It is widely believed that Botswana got a raw deal when De Beers made moves to go private and was eventually absorbed into the London-based mining giant Anglo American. 
Debswana was to receive 5 percent interest in De Beers, but, once De Beers went private and became a part of Anglo American, Botswana found themselves high and dry with a 15 percent stake in an unlisted, much smaller division of De Beers which was, itself, deeply in debt.
Investigations have also revealed that Botswana was cheated out of millions of dollars in a questionable De Beers bonus scheme.
Eight of De Beers big shots, amongst them Nicky Oppenheimer, made over $72 million, while Botswana government partners received nothing. 
Dr. Akolang Tombale, former Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Minerals, explained that the agreement was faulty from the start, with De Beers bonuses being based on production levels without taking into consideration the market price for diamonds.
Even when diamond prices fell over the past several years, De Beers boosted production at the shared Debswana mines.  In short, even as the carat/ratio plummeted, De Beers was mining more and more diamonds and making piles of money.  The Botswana government found itself with hundreds of thousands of carats of unsellable diamonds. 
 
“It is in this context that the BCP calls for the negotiations to be conducted in a transparent manner to ensure that they are credible.┬á A truly democratic and accountable government should not make secret deals with private companies. ┬áBotswana deserves an agreement that allows its citizens to meaningfully participate in the diamond production, processing and manufacturing. ┬áThe BCP calls for majority shareholding in Debswana, instead of the current 50/50 arrangement, which makes decision making cumbersome and easily manipulated by De Beers,” states the press release from BCP.
The Slaughter and May investigation also revealed that Botswana got a raw deal from its partnership with De Beers because government representatives in the Debswana board were disadvantaged because nearly all were professionals from differing disciplines outside the diamond industry. ?The De Beers Group nominees on the other hand are from within the industry.
“The imbalance has been the cause of considerable friction at Debswana, to the extent that government appointed non executive directors have been excluded from major decision making processes,” states the Slaughter & May report.
The BCP press release further states that, “the negotiation team must be constituted by individuals who have a rich understanding of the global diamond industry. Such persons should also possess a wealth of experience in international trade as well as proven record in successful negotiations with multi-national corporations. The time to strike a better deal is now or never.”
With the negotiations threatening to flounder on the rocks of paranoia, the difficulty is not diagnosing why trust has broken down, but deciding how it is to be rebuilt.
