Botswana�s experiment with diamond beneficiation � will it succeed?

In Zambia the World Bank together with UKaid have argued strenuously that copper beneficiation is not do-able. In Botswana and South Africa the World Bank dispatched Professor Hausman in 2011 to convince governments not to beneficiate. But the idea that Africa will just continue to (efficiently) dig holes in the ground and export unprocessed raw materials making China, India and Europe rich from the processing is absolute anathema in most African capitals. The argument is so instinctively repulsive to Africans that it makes aging middle class African officials, who were schooled in beneficiation in European universities,  remember their liberation struggle days and start using long forgotten rhetoric about ‘economic imperialism’.