Last week, President Ian Khama was in his element when he launched Cut 8 project in Jwaneng.
The multi-billion Pula project is billed as Botswana’s biggest and most ambitious ever.
The project is meant to enhance the mine’s productive capacity while also improving technological efficiencies in the face of what promises to be more difficult years and costlier productions ahead as a result of increasing depths.
By any account, Jwaneng Mine is a world class asset.
In both the Debswana and De Beers companies, the mine is a crown jewel. The mine produces the most valuable diamonds and in significantly higher numbers.
Given the importance of diamonds to Botswana and the importance of Jwaneng Mine to Botswana’s diamond industry Cut 8 is a very important investment, not only in its scale and magnitude but perhaps, more importantly, in what it seeks to achieve.
The wealth that the project is expected to unlock and unleash will no doubt propel Botswana to new heights.
As the De Beers patriarch, Nicky Oppenheimer, said ten years ago at the event to launch yet another multi-billion Pula diamond project, the Orapa 2000, ‘while diamonds have been kind to Botswana, Botswana has been more kind to diamonds.’
There is no doubting that diamonds have proved a boon for Botswana.
While it is well and good to celebrate diamonds, it would be unwise of us as a nation to turn a blind eye to the problems that have also come about as a result of the stones. We need to always remember that diamonds are stones with no inherent value.
The value of diamonds relies exclusively on the emotional equity that people attach to them.
Beyond that there is nothing.
They are a discretionary purchase from which people can always choose to walk away from.
Because they are a sentimental instrument, appealing more to emotion than to substance, it is important that those who benefit from diamonds like us go an extra mile into trying to nurture and safeguard this fragile and delicate existential value of this resource.
In that respect, it is worth emphasising that many people from the West do not have a sophisticated understanding of where diamonds they buy are coming from.
Thus, while we celebrate that which diamonds have bequeathed to Botswana, we should never turn a blind eye to the dangers that lurk in the shadows.
More than anybody else, our leaders should know what a fertile ground of negative imagery diamonds the world over have become.
It was, therefore, disheartening and tactless to hear President Ian Khama take on Survival International in the manner that he did last week.
For us, the problem is not what the President said.
Rather, it is his wading into a war which he knows his Government can never win.
“It is only our misguided detractor, Survival International, who would like to see all the socio-economic benefits from diamonds for all our citizens reversed, by embarking upon a campaign of lies and misinformation that seeks to achieve for a section of our population a life of backwardness that appeals to their racist mentality of having people in Africa live a primitive life of deprivation co-existing alongside wild animals as was the case in the past. All our people must benefit from our development.
“No Motswana should exist as a tourist object to satisfy the desires of a few misguided foreigners living relatively well off with all the benefits they enjoy in a developed economy while wanting to satisfy their fantasies by trying to influence some of our people to live a primeval life of a by-gone era of hardship and indignity. We, at least, in this country consider all people to be equal, whichever continent they live on. Their campaign to encourage people to boycott our diamonds and tourism would negatively affect the welfare of all Batswana, thus exposing the myth that they claim to care for people. The opposite is the truth, as demonstrated by their on-going actions. They really only care for themselves and use these campaigns to appeal to donors’ emotions, so they may benefit from funding. Survival International are nothing more than modern day highway robbers, demanding ‘your money or your life’. This is how Survival International survives.”
This paper calls on Botswana Government to forget about Survival International and allow Basarwa access to water inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
