Botswana: As part of the new deal agreed by global diamond giant De Beers Group and the world’s leading diamond producer, Botswana, the two parties will work together to explore more diamonds around the world.
Deliberating on this move that will export Botswana’s decades of experience and expertise in diamond mining to the rest of the world, Minister of Mineral & Energy Lefoko Maxwell Moagi said international exploration will continue to position Botswana as a global benchmark of diamond mining even beyond production of its local mining operations.
“We will be leaning on De Beers’ experience from working in multiple jurisdictions. That is one advantage of us working with De Beers in this international exploration,” he said at a press briefing during the Natural Diamond Summit on Monday.
“You will note that most of our mines are ageing, and therefore, we need to look beyond Botswana if we want to continue generating wealth for this country,” he said
Moagi noted that there are countries around the world and in Africa that are well endowed with vast mineral resources, but they don’t have the competence and experience that Botswana has from mining diamonds ethically for over five decades.
“We will be able to advance these explorations to production in a much quicker timeline because we have run the world ‘s biggest diamond mines for decades.”
Al Cook, CEO of De Beers Group, revealed that the two parties have already set our key potential exploration sites to embark on around the world.
“We have agreed that there will be a number of countries in the world where De Beers and Botswana will explore together; we believe that matches the diamond expertise of Botswana and its force as the world ‘s leading diamond nation together with De Beers’ unrivalled technological capacity in the understanding of exploration potential in the world.”
“If you have the world’s greatest diamond country and the world ‘s greatest diamond company exploring together, that gives some confidence,” he said.
Cook said the agreement has set out a series of prospects around the world that the two parties will work together on, ranging from here in Botswana to Canada and Brazil.
“We agreed to examine this potential together and determine how we will explore those prospects together in the future.”
“These prospects are distilled from our vast database of potential exploration sites around the world, and we wanted to work together on the places that we felt were the most prospective for exploring and recovering diamonds in the long run.”
Cook, who is a geologist by training, said Botswana and De Beers will accelerate the international exploration together and add additional countries.
” I think it’s appropriate that the greatest diamond-producing nation begins to take its skills outside Botswana, and if we at De Beers can play a role in facilitating that, in facilitating other nations to learn from Botswana, we are proud to do so,” he said.