Liberia’s Ministry of Lands, Mines and Energy has responded to two separate stories in a recent edition of the New Democrat and Public Agenda newspapers, respectively captioned, “Resource Misuse Conflict Factor – Global Witness” and “Improper Financial Controls at MLME Threaten Liberia’s Reconstruction”. Both papers cite a statement they said was issued by Global Witness and Pay What You Publish (PWYP) in response to the 2006/2007 HIPC Audit report released by the Auditor General (AG) of Liberia. The papers specifically quotes the Federation of Liberian Youth (FLY), a member organization of PWYP, as stating, “The Auditor General’s findings reaffirm the need for far reaching policy reform and a renewed commitment aggressively to tackle corruption within the Ministry (of Lands, Mines and Energy)”.
While the MLME has yet to see the full content of the GW-PWYP statement, the Ministry still wishes to provide some clarification based on the New Democrat and Public Agenda
excerpts, with the hope of removing the misinformation. Concerning the country’s controls over the Kimberley Process Certification Regime, John C. Nylander, Liberia’s Deputy Minister of Mines has clarified that Liberia has one of the most rigid internal control regimes of the Kimberley Process participating countries.
“Our control calls for the registration of all recoveries from the mines to the point of export. The regime requires that all diamond trading transactions be conducted by licensed participants only. Additionally, the participant is under obligation to carry a Government Diamond Office official voucher authenticating the description of the finds and the origin of the diamonds. Given that smuggling cannot be completely eliminated from alluvial mines, this particular requirement seeks to eliminate the circulation of conflict diamonds and the subsequent minimization of potential smuggling. The Government Diamond Office has compiled all the necessary procedures that support a genuine implementation of the KP,” explains Nylander.
Nylander continues that the country’s diamond database is still under construction. In the interim, the Government Diamond Office has designed a reporting form for the use of all regional offices to capture a greater percentage of all recoveries which should suffice for production statistics from alluvial mines.
“The problem with production reporting is not unique to Liberia; Ghana was recently a beneficiary of some technical assistance to help with reasonable production reporting. Until Liberia can benefit from similar program, we reaffirm that our current method of gathering production statistics is more than adequate under prevailing circumstances,” explains Nylander.
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