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African diamonds are in the news again. And once more, Africans are dying as a result of what should have been a blessing to their lives. This time the victims are not from the same old notorious places like Angola, Sierra Leone, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but from a new and badly troubled location where diamond-related deaths were hitherto not an issue. Enter Zimbabwe. Late last month, the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch released a report in which it accused the Zimbabwean government of complicity in the killing of more than 200 people during a raid and takeover by the Zimbabwe military of the Marange diamond fields in the eastern part of the country. The government explains the operation as a move designed to flush out illegal diamond miners from the area.
Until now, it had seemed as though the specter of bloodshed in the African diamond sector was receding into the past in the wake of the robust blood diamond campaigns that led to the 2003 creation of the Kimberley Process that enables legitimate producers to certify diamonds as conflict-ffee. The climate of optimism was further enhanced by success stories in other diamond-rich African countries. In the fall of 2008, De Beers Group chair Nicky Oppenheimer published an article in the World Policy Journal entitled “Diamonds, Development, and Democracy,” describing the strides taken in the southern African nation of Botswana that has made it a model of how diamonds could positively transform the destiny of Africans. However, the recent outbreak of diamond-related violence in Zimbabwe demonstrates that optimism about closing the chapter on diamond bloodshed may be premature. The sad reality today is that for all the enthusiasm about a new dawn of democracy and development, African diamonds remain at best a coin with two faces—the golden face portrayed in Oppenheimer’s Botswana and the face of the proverbial “resource curse” of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
The progress made in Botswana with diamond revenues is undeniable. The steep investments in infrastructure have made the country one of the continent’s front-runners in terms of human welfare gains. In addition to well-equipped schools and hospitals, the country’s GDP per capita had spiked from about $617 at independence in 1966 to well over $10,000 in 2005.
But the situation in Botswana’s northern neighbors of Angola to the northwest and lately Zimbabwe to the northeast demonstrate vividly that the role of diamonds in improving the lives of Africa’s masses remains largely unfinished business. More important, the misery index for Africa’s peoples is still unacceptably high when the matter of diamonds is considered. And the challenge to be confronted seems to change in each new situation. Angolan gave us the infamous “blood diamond” or “conflict diamond” phenomenon, with rebels using the proceeds of diamond sales to finance their bloody insurgencies against national governments. During Angola’s diamond-financed civil war, which lasted from its independence in 1975 until 2002, over 2 million Angolans perished.
Contrary to expectations, Angolans have not fared much better in the postwar period thanks to the country’s notoriously corrupt and insensitive government which has failed to improve their lot, despite considerable revenues lost from diamond sales. Human rights violations have been rife, especially in the Lundas region, where most of Angola’s diamonds are mined. The culprits have included both government agents and the private security outfits maintained by the multinational diamond majors operating in the country under assorted (and shamefully non-transparent) joint venture arrangements with the government. In one appalling instance of abuse in 2006, one of these private security outfits (many of which are owned by top brass military and police personnel who are still in service) reportedly appropriated and privatized a public bridge for a period of time.
O. Carl Unegbu is a Nigerian-born American lawyer and journalist.