14 Jul 2022

Batswana should be eager to tell their country’s beautiful story to help build the Botswana brand.

President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi said this in an interview yesterday after touring the American Museum of Natural History, where Botswana’s Okavango Blue diamond is on display. 

Dr Masisi said government had been working hard to present a positive image of Botswana to the world, so much so that the nation’s brand had been re-energised, but more needed to be done. 

Botswana’s was a positive story and “every citizen has a role to play in marketing the country and its resources,” he said. 

Dr Masisi said his external visits, as well as those undertaken by members of his cabinet and senior government officials, had helped make Botswana more noticeable and attractive. 

He urged Batswana to use every platform to join the mission to share their country’s success story. 

The President also urged the nation to do even better at welcoming investors and tourists in order to further enhance the Botswana brand. 

Dr Masisi said Okavango Blue, a large, egg-shaped ‘fancy blue’ diamond of exceptional clarity discovered in Orapa in 2018, was an example of natural quality gems found in Botswana, which remained one of the world’s largest producers of diamonds by volume and value. 

In addition to naturally producing such quality stones, Botswana had consistently maintained ethical methods of mining both diamonds and other minerals, ensuring their  integrity up to the point of sale, the President said. 

As such, he said, neither conflict nor synthetic diamonds could replace the natural gem quality that Botswana produced. 

Dr Masisi said international exhibitions of Botswana diamonds should market the ‘authentic beauty and diamonds for development story’ that had characterised Botswana’s post-independence trajectory. 

With Botswana bidding to host the secretariat of the Kimberley Process the importance and value of Botswana’s diamonds, their authenticity and positive contribution to the world needed to be accentuated, he said. 

One of the rarest coloured stones, Okavango Blue, has been on display at the American Museum of Natural History’s Melissa and Keith Meister Gallery, as the centerpiece of a presentation featuring Botswana diamonds. 

The stone is on loan from the Okavango Diamond Company for exhibition and marketing purposes. The museum averaged five million visitors annually before the COVID-19 pandemic. BOPA