Zimbabwe’s Mines Minister Obert Mpofu said last July that the country had produced just over 11 million carats of diamonds from the Marange fields in the past five years.
He also noted that total sales recorded during the period were slightly over $200 million, suggesting an average price of about $18 per carat.
Official data from the Kimberley Process, however, shows that Zimbabwe produced 8,4 million carats of diamonds worth $340 million in 2010.
Mpofu is said to have also stated then that the country’s treasury had received over $174 million of the diamond revenue, which implied that miners had paid out most of the money earned from the sale of diamonds.
A member of parliament from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) formation, Eddie Cross said in a parliament speech that he had conducted an “investigation” into the diamond mining activity at Marange after realising that the figures given by Mpofu last July “bore little or no relationship to reality”.
He said published sales figures for other diamond mining activities in the Southern Africa region suggested that the average value of rough diamonds extracted from Marange should be about $67 per carat rather than the figures the minister gave in parliament.
Cross said the actual value of sales of rough diamonds from Marange in 2010 alone was $563 million and not the stated $200 million for the past five years.
He also said that data available suggested that output from the Mbada claims had been running at 150 tonnes of ore per hour since new equipment was installed in 2009.
This amounted to over 1 million tonnes of ore per annum.
“At 20 carats per tonne this is equal to 20 million carats – two and half times the volume declared by the Minister for 2010 and this estimate ignores the production of the other five claims and the hundreds of informal sector miners that are still operating in the area,” Cross said.
“If we apply these average prices ($67 per carat) to the unofficial estimates that I have obtained for the Mbada claims only, then we come up with the astonishing figure of $1.4 billion for actual raw diamond sales in 2010 for Mbada.”
He said Mbada would likely maintain this level of output in 2011, adding that with rough diamond prices having risen 20 per cent, output in the current year from the firm’s operations should be worth $1.7 billion dollars.
Cross said that Anjin operations were even equal or greater than that of Mbada.
This was recently confirmed by deputy mines minister Gift Chimanikire who noted that that Anjin, which produces about 234,750 carats of diamonds a month from the Marange field, was the country’s top producer of the precious stones.
Cross said that although output figures for Marange Resources (formerly Canadile Miners) were not available, they were thought to be significant and to have increased since 2009.
“If this is true then we could be looking at annual sales from these three operators of over $4 billion dollars a year at present,” he said.
Cross said he had come to the conclusion that Zimbabwe’s Mines Ministry had been misleading the nation on the magnitude and value of diamond sales from the Marange fields.
Finance minister Tendai Biti had always been on record saying that some government officials were pillaging the diamond revenue.
“Some people are stealing. The money we are getting from diamonds and the carats which are being extracted, they are not in agreement. I won’t name the people, but the truth is people are stealing,” he was quoted by Newsday newspaper as saying recently.
“We are being told that diamonds are being sold at $60 per carat . . . (and) looking at these figures, the nation could have got $4 billion in 2010 alone, but we got only $154 million and in 2011 we are looking to get 167 million.”
He said the introduction of a new Diamond Act will help plug current loopholes.
A South African diamond consultant, Keith Lapperman who spoke at a Mining Indaba in Harare last August said that Zimbabwe lost $500 million worth of diamonds through smuggling syndicates in 2010.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe also estimated in 2009 that at least $1.2 billion had been lost per annum through black market trade of minerals.
Heaving looked at the figures presented by minister Mpofu last July, as well as the argument given by Cross, coupled with Biti’s continuous lamentation, one can conclude that there is a lot of underhand dealings taking place in Zimbabwe’s diamond industry.
It’s only a matter of time before the truth comes out.
Mathew Nyaungwa, Rough&Polished
