Botswana Mines 70 Percent of De Beers Diamonds and Owned Just 15

Somewhere tonight, a jeweller in London or New York is polishing a stone that began its life under Botswana's red earth. The buyer will pay a fortune for it. The country that gave up that stone will see a fraction of the profit, and most of that will be swallowed by the mechanics of a system it never controlled.

For decades, Botswana has produced roughly 70 percent of De Beers' diamonds. Yet it held only 15 percent of the company itself. Think about that. The nation that does the digging, the risking, and the bleeding owned a minority sliver of the brand that decides what those stones are worth. We have accepted this as normal. It is not normal. It is a structure built to keep African wealth in African soil while the profits leave by air freight.

This week, President Duma Boko told parliament that Botswana's holding would "double from the current 15 per cent," making the government the single largest shareholder in De Beers. He backed a consortium led by former chief executive Gareth Penny to take over the struggling miner from Anglo American. Namibia and Angola, the other diamond-producing states in the region, would take stakes too. Boko called it the first time the great diamond nations of southern Africa would "sit together at the ownership table of the company that markets their diamonds." Lawmakers applauded. They should also be asking hard questions, because applause is cheap and ownership is expensive.

Here is the part the speeches leave out. Botswana already owns half of Debswana, the joint venture with De Beers through which the mines actually operate. The country is not a passive bystander in this business. It is a partner that has been carrying the risk while the marketing and the final value capture happened elsewhere. Doubling a minority stake in the marketer is a meaningful correction, but only if the country uses that ownership with discipline rather than theatre.

The International Monetary Fund has warned Gaborone, and it warned it again last year, that the country must diversify its economy away from diamonds. That warning is not a suggestion. It is a diagnosis. An economy that depends on a single commodity, sold through a single channel, controlled largely by a single corporate structure, is one bad market cycle away from a fiscal crisis. The lab-grown diamond boom has already shown how quickly the ground can shift under an industry that assumed its prices were permanent. Every Motswana who has watched a mining town thin out after a downturn knows exactly what that fragility feels like.

We have seen what happens when diamond wealth is handled badly. In Zimbabwe, soldiers and state-linked operators seized the Marange fields and turned them into a killing ground in 2008, with human rights groups documenting the murder and torture of diggers and the forced labour of civilians. The revenue vanished into the pockets of the regime and its cronies while the Kimberley Process, meant to stop blood diamonds, looked the other way for years. In Angola, the state diamond company Sodiam became a family piggy bank for the dos Santos clan, and the scale of the looting has been laid bare in court and in the press. Those are not ancient history. Those are the warnings Botswana must read every morning.

Which is why Botswana's story matters so much. This is one of the few African states that got the fundamentals right. It has held regular multiparty elections since independence in 1966. Its courts have, more often than not, been independent enough to rule against the government. Its Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime was created to chase powerful men, not just petty clerks. And in 2024, voters ended nearly six decades of rule by a single party, proving that democratic accountability in Botswana is not decorative. That is the record that makes this moment so promising. It is also why the bar must be higher here than anywhere else.

Let us be precise about what should happen next. Botswana should publish the full shareholder agreement with De Beers, the consortium, and its regional partners, with every clause on governance, board representation, dividend flows, and exit rights made available to parliament and the public. Secrecy is the oxygen of every resource scandal on this continent. Take it away.

The 30 percent stake should be placed under a statutory sovereign wealth fund with a legally binding rule that dividends cannot be spent on recurrent budget items when the diamond price falls, only saved or invested. The fund's accounts should be audited by the Auditor General and published quarterly. No minister, no president, and no cousin of anyone important should be able to dip into it for a convenient election project. Norway built its fund on exactly these rules. Botswana has the democratic credibility to do the same, and it must.

The country must also push beneficiation seriously. Cutting, polishing, and jewellery manufacturing should be pulled into Gaborone and Francistown, with licensing rules that reward local value addition and clear incentives for private investors. Every diamond that leaves the country uncut is a job that someone in Antwerp or Mumbai gets instead of a young Motswana. Pair that with serious investment in the other pillars of a modern economy: financial services, tourism beyond the safari brochure, digital infrastructure, and agro-processing. Mauritius shows what a small African economy can become when it protects property rights, runs clean tax administration, and courts foreign capital on fair terms. Botswana's own cattle and beef exports prove the country can compete beyond minerals when it invests in the right things.

Finally, the state should open the sector to competition. Smaller, independent miners need access to exploration licences and fair processes, not a system where a handful of insiders hold the best ground. Competition lowers the odds of a single corporate decision bankrupting a country.

So here is what we demand. We demand that the shareholder agreement be published before a single share changes hands. We demand that parliament pass a sovereign wealth fund law with withdrawal rules that protect the fund from politicians, and that the Auditor General certify its accounts every year. We demand a dated, measurable diversification plan, with targets reported to the public, so the IMF's warning becomes a yardstick instead of a footnote. We demand that cutting and polishing jobs be created at home. And we demand that the Southern African Development Community and the African Union treat this consortium as a test case for transparency in extractive ownership across the continent, not a photo opportunity.

To the citizens of Botswana: this is your diamond. To the Namibians and Angolans sitting at the same table: the old way of letting foreign firms sell your stones while your people stay poor is finished, or it should be. To the African civil society organisations, journalists, and business leaders who have been warning about resource capture for decades: now is the time to stand in parliament and ask the questions that cannot be answered with applause.

Seventy percent of the diamonds. Fifteen percent of the company. Doubling that number is a step forward. But ownership without accountability is just a bigger seat at a rigged table. Botswana has the democracy, the courts, and the record to prove that African wealth can serve African people. Now it has to prove it again, in writing, in public, and in the decades that follow.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL