09 Nov 2023

 The Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) is confident that Minerals Policy with a strong component of beneficiation is one of the surest ways of improving the economy of the country.

Responding to the State-of-the-Nation Address on Wednesday, Leader of the Opposition, Mr Dithapelo Keorapetse said beneficiation would diversify the economy and create jobs.

He said the UDC had always pledged to move up the value chain across sectors and integrate into global value chains to arrest the export of jobs through unprocessed commodities.

“We promised to develop beneficiation strategies for the mineral sector, especially diamonds, coal, soda ash and nickel/copper and facilitate investment to domesticate jobs, technology and related intellectual property,” he said.

Mr Keorapetse said there was need to move from practices like exporting raw materials such as copper concentrate, blister copper, unprocessed base metals and diamonds if job creation was to be achieved.

On the recent agreement between De Beers and government, he said if UDC was to assume power, it would subscribe to the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative and push for transparency on mining deals.

He, however, hailed the deal, but called for a final and binding agreement between the two parties. 

Mr Keorapetse cautioned that there was a need to assess whether the annual P1 billion to Diamond for Development Fund for the next 10 years factored in economic determinants such as inflation, and to check how much De Beers itself would be making from the deal.

He said it was disappointing that Jwaneng, Letlhakane and Orapa remained small mining towns, yet they held the most valuable diamond resources in the world. 

He said comparatively, other mining cities like Johannesburg developed into metropolis on the back of mineral deposits found there.

Mr Keorapetse said despite the agreement, there was a need to push for more than half the acquisition of De beers from the current 15 per cent, looking at the fact that Botswana accounted for two thirds of the entire De Beers production.

“When you look at the journey of a diamond, Botswana has for a long time cared and focused on the upstream factors such as diamond exploration and rough diamond production and it is only recently that it showed a bit of interest in the midstream aspect of cutting and polishing. 

As a country we are still not doing well in jewellery manufacturing, which is more valuable in terms of global market share and contribution to GDP,” he said.

He said in the midstream sector, Botswana only did rough diamond sales and distribution while on the downstream like diamond jewellery retail and global consumer demand, the country was not doing much although it was supposed to be a place to come to for luxury diamond products.

Mr Keorapetse said Botswana should take cue from Saudi Arabia, whom he said threatened to nationalise its oil reserves unless they were given a 50 per cent stake by American oil companies, forced them to relocate from the US and later pushed for more control and acquired 98 per cent of Saudi Aramco. Ends