In pursuit of the diamond deal
Mbongeni Mguni | Monday December 25, 2023 13:11
There was no choice. Having pursued the single biggest story in the country’s economy for the better part of five years, there was really no question of sleeping when matters finally neared a head. That would be akin to travelling 20 hours to the world famous New Year’s Eve party at Times Square in New York, then falling asleep at 10pm.
The story the handful of journalists and I were burning the midnight oil for, is of course, the now historic diamond deal between De Beers and government.
Known officially as a sales agreement, the partnership between government and De Beers is one of the global diamond industry’s most valuable covenants. Botswana is the world’s largest producer of rough diamonds by value and the production and sale of these stones is governed by the sales agreement. Since the De Beers/government joint venture kicked off in 1969, revenues from the agreement have powered the economy to its middle-income status, while making De Beers the billion-dollar global titan it is today.
The sales agreement is renegotiated periodically and prior to the announcement I was waiting for on that lonely morning, the last such talks had been concluded in September 2011.
The negotiations between the two partners have traditionally been a closely guarded secret, with journalists specifically held at bay until the usually terse statement is released at the conclusion of talks. And between 2019 and very early this year, the latest negotiations followed the routine, although frequent extensions of deadlines even after COVID-19 had subsided, did raise some eyebrows.
Murmurs of tensions in the talks were officially downplayed in January by the Minerals and Energy minister, Lefoko Moagi, who told Mmegi “there’s not much left, but the one or two issues left are material”. A loaded statement in retrospect.
Two months later, in March 2023, President Mokgweetsi Masisi made his now famous speech in Moshupa, where he gave the clearest sign that not all was well between the two parties.
“We are at the negotiating table now and because we have learnt some new things, we want more for the Botswana government and we are going to get more; the allocation of rough diamonds. “This is because we want to do what we have learnt. “We have learnt in outcome terms and this means we can make much, much more money than we have been making by selling rough,” he said.
That tensions over Botswana’s push for greater values in diamonds, were rising. This became clear from other utterances by the President and the restrained but many times revealing responses from De Beers, leading to perhaps the most transparency afforded to journalists and by extension, the public, in the history of the diamond talks.
The challenge for journalists in such matters is not just about staying on top of the story, or covering every “breaking” part of it. In fact, the “breaking” part of the story was the proverbial “low-hanging fruit” as developments were either “broken” via statements by the President himself or De Beers or the numerous commentators who began responding to the issue.
The real challenge lay in understanding, analysing and developing reportage around the story. Beyond the “what,” what is the “why,” who are the various actors involved and their motivation, what are the drivers of these developments, what are the implications of what is happening, are we able to spot the inflection points etc?
Textbook journalism unfortunately encourages its practitioners to develop rigidly binary mindsets, the adversarial approach to story-writing that requires one voice against another, an allegation set against a denial, a villain and a foe. This approach tends to be reductionist, taking complex, multi-faceted issues and compressing them into neat, simplistic black and white boxes. The expression “both sides of the story” simply has very little space in modern journalism where most issues have numerous sides, but here, so temptingly, were two actual sides: De Beers and government. And engaged in a dispute, no less!
And yet, every press conference attended this year, each speech listened to, each overt and latent reaction noted down, the last-minute weekend updates we were called to attend and other information dug up around the historic deal, was work in progress of understanding, analysing and developing reportage.
And because of that understanding acquired in pursuit of the year’s biggest story, none of the business journalists blinking away sleep on July 1, thought the announcement that eventually hit our Whatsapps at around 330am, was the end of the pursuit.
This year’s steep diamond downturn, the challenges at HB Antwerp, the first ever rough diamond allocation to citizens and government’s joint fight with De Beers against the Group of Seven’s impending ‘market-swallowing’ initiative, show that the pursuit goes on.