Nicky Oppenheimer, Chairman of De Beers, has sent US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a letter thanking her for referring to the diamond giant’s relationship with Botswana. Oppenheimer describes Botswana as a stable and successful environment to do business in.
In her recent tour of Africa, Clinton cited Botswana’s prudent management of its natural resources in the context of diamond mining.
“It is a painful truth; through colonialism and post-colonialism, the continent’s riches have too often gone to the few, not he many. But Africa itself hold an example that I would recommend to all of you – those of you in government and those of you in business – and that is the arrangement in Botswana for the mining and marketing of their diamonds with De Beers. The government of Botswana in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, post-independence, was so visionary. The leadership there was so devoted to building a country that would have the advantages that they wanted to see for their people after colonialism and finally ended. So they struck a hard bargain, and they created, essentially, a trust fund where a percentage of the revenues from the diamonds went into that fund, and then that fund was used to pave the roads. And if you’ve travelled in Botswana, you know that the roads are the best in Sub-Saharan Africa except for South Africa. And we can see the results year after year after year,” commends Clinton.
