CNRG statement 5-26-16

IMG_1336.jpg

Farai Maguwu, the very first Zimbabwean Giraffe Hero, is sticking his neck way out to protest corruption and injustice in the diamond industry in Zimbabwe and indeed all of Africa. Maguwu is Director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG), a civil society organization working with people of diamond mining communities like Marange that have been plundered by the corruption and greed of diamond mining companies and government officials.

Zimbabwe is a country with a $3.6 billion annual budget for its 14 million citizens who have been cheated by the looting of diamonds worth more than $15 billion between 2009 and 2015. ”Given that the state owned 50% shares in all the diamond firms in Marange, ” Maguwu says, “we conclude that the grand theft involved unpatriotic senior government officials who are abusing their positions in government to serve their individual and foreign interests.”

And the problem goes beyond Zimbabwe. In a May 25 statement, CNRG charges that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been corrupting African governments and the diamond industry to gain easy and cheap access to Africa’s diamonds. The UAE, according to CNRG, has been the main destination of illicitly sourced Zimbabwean diamonds, allowing traders there to buy diamonds at artificially low prices and resell them at top dollar. “Africa is getting peanuts from the sale of its rough diamonds,” charges Maguwu.

The corruption of selected Zimbabwean government officials, CNRG continues, has been blatant. For example,

In 2013 the UAE appointed Zimbabwe’s Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Mines, Prof Francis Gudyanga to the Board of Dubai Diamonds Exchange, presumably for the purpose of weakening Zimbabwe’s internal controls. In any case, it’s clear that a Permanent Secretary of the Mines Ministry of a diamond producing country who also sits on the Board of a major trading platform in a diamond industry hub is heavily conflicted.

The same controversy surrounds the similar appointments of other African government officials and company executives. So whom do these conflicted people serve, Maguwu asks—the people of the countries they supposedly represent—or their private interests? CNRG has now publicly called on all these conflicted officials to resign their posts in the Dubai Diamonds Exchange.

In addition, CNRG calls on the governments of diamond-producing states, as well as KPCS (the multinational body ostensibly set up to police the African diamond trade) to do their jobs—to reform the diamond industry, wipe out rampant corruption and finally deliver justice and a fair share of the wealth to the cheated communities like Marange where the diamonds are found. “How can diamonds that generated over $15 billion for people far away from Marange create such abject poverty at the point of origin,” asks Maguwu. “Diamonds do not fall from the sky. They are mined in real communities where real people were born and live. These people matter.”