So you want to know why Africa is so "rich" and yet so many of its people so "poor"? [Alternately titled, "More Fallout from Brexit"]

Here is a 'brief' synopsis of one situation in Botswana, literally, the tip of the iceberg. By comparison to other crude oil-rich, diamond0infused, and gold-embedded countries in Africa, Botswana has remained largely, and relatively, unscathed by the greedy political machinations, military invasions, Rothschild-manipulated economy, and other vile schemes of America, France and Britain. 

This might change soon with more and more discoveries such as this latest one.....already some of their partnerships in the diamond industry are with De Beers (we know that history).

On January 25, 1905, at the Premier Mine in Pretoria, South Africa, a 3,106-carat diamond was discovered during a routine inspection by the mine’s superintendent. Weighing 1.33 pounds, and christened the “Cullinan,” it was the largest diamond ever found.

Found by Sir Thomas Cullinan, who owned the mine, he sold the diamond to the Transvaal provincial Apartheid government, which presented the stone to Britain’s King Edward VII as a "birthday gift".

"The Cullinan" was later cut into nine large stones and about 100 smaller ones, valued at millions of dollars all told. The largest stone is called the “Star of Africa I,” or “Cullinan I,” and at 530 carats, it is the largest-cut fine-quality colorless diamond in the world. The second largest stone, the “Star of Africa II” or “Cullinan II,” is 317 carats. Both of these stones, as well as the “Cullinan III,” are on display in the Tower of London with Britain’s other crown jewels; the Cullinan I is mounted in the British Sovereign’s Royal Scepter, while the Cullinan II sits in the Imperial State Crown.

110 years later, the next largest diamond, the "Lesedi la Rona", or “our light”, in the Tswana language of Botswana, where the massive stone was unearthed eight months ago by the Canadian-owned Lucara Diamond Corp at its Karowe mine in Botswana. 

Some Batswana are not happy with the winning name for the 1,109 carat gem quality diamond. Part of the insulting process was a competition to name the diamond, a competition won by Thembani Moitlhobogi who hails from Mmadikola village and who received a prize of 25,000 Pula ($2300), for the name.

Lucara is a member of the Lundin Group of Companies, which operates in 25 countries and is listed on the TSX Exchange, and the Nasdaq Stockholm. The Lundin Group is an internationally recognized group of publicly-traded, natural resource companies founded in 1971 by Adolf H. Lundin and led by sons Lukas H. Lundin and Ian H. Lundin. 

On the back of the exceptional stones at Karowe, Lucara improved full-year earnings by 70 percent. For 2015, the Vancouver-headquartered miner reported net income of $77.8 million, which was derived from sales of 377,136 carats of diamonds, for gross proceeds of $223.8 million.

In the months after its discovery the diamond was exhibited in a world tour in Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, and Antwerp, Belgium, a major centre of the world diamond trade....almost everywhere except African where it was unearthed.

As the world's current largest uncut diamond, the 1,109-carat, tennis ball-sized diamond failed to sell at a London auction this week after bids did not reach the minimum reserve price as last week’s vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union had a chilling effect on the auction business.

Still Lucara, which is Canadian, and an otherwise minor player in the industry compared to big boys like De Beers Group, (research the genocide that Cecil B. Rhodes wreaked in South Africa to attain that notes distinction), has been doing well. The same week it found the Lesedi La Rona, it uncovered two other giant diamonds nearby. These included the world's sixth largest gem-quality diamond, an 813 carat rough that Lucara auctioned off in May for the record-breaking sum of $63 million.

The rough diamond is believed to be more than 2.5 billion years old.

It had been expected to sell for more than £52m ($70m) but the highest bid was about £45m ($61m).

After it failed to sell, the Canada-based company, which has retained possession of the diamond, saw its stock fall more than 14% on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

But what about Botswana, one of the world's biggest suppliers of rough diamonds? How much do sales like this benefit the country?

After all, in many parts of Africa, the discovery of diamonds hasn't been a blessing. The history of the diamond industry has been fraught with worker exploitation, environmental destruction, government corruption and squandering of revenues. And that's not even mentioning all the so-called "blood diamonds" used to pay for civil wars in countries ranging from Sierra Leone to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The good luck part ironically began with the fact that when it was still a British colony, Botswana was thought to have virtually no natural resources.

While the British were running the country it really was seen as a not very useful backwater. This, on the one hand, meant that not much money was spent on developing infrastructure. But it also meant that there wasn't a particularly big interest in keeping control.

The consequently smooth political transition to independence in 1966 helped ensure that Botswana's new government was stable and comparatively well-run.

A year later, diamonds were discovered in Botswana. But even then It still took quite some time before it was realized that the diamond deposits were actually quite valuable.

The principle was that all the revenues from what essentially amounted to a depletion of an asset, namely Botswana's diamonds, had to be reinvested in other assets, so that mining wouldn't lead to an overall depletion of the national assets. In other words, invest in people and projects that will create future wealth.

Another bit of luck is that Botswana's diamonds aren't the alluvial kind, spread out in shallow mud across vast territories that are hard to secure. In Botswana the gems are deep in the ground, so physically it's easy to manage access to where the diamonds are.

The government decided to use that control to negotiate some very favorable deals with private mining companies. This wasn't exactly easy. The need for the expertise of private mining companies seemed clear based on the experience of neighboring African countries that had nationalized their mines with less than stellar results. But Botswana's officials also appreciated that they might be at a disadvantage bargaining with mining executives who would be far more knowledgeable about the industry.

Obviously if you're sitting across the table from a multinational mining company that has resources to bring in all sorts of experts, you need to have the same, so the government also made sure that if it needed a top London mining lawyer to help build its case it would do that to make sure that it could match the resources that the mining company would have on the other side of the table.

The actual arrangements have varied over the years, but the upshot is that Botswana shares joint-ownership of the most important mines with De Beers in a setup that guarantees it the lion's share of the profits. Botswana has also set up a progressive taxation system under which other mining companies are taxed at higher rates when they get windfalls.

It's hard to overstate the impact of all this on Botswana's roughly 2 million citizens. The percentage of citizens living at or below poverty declined from 50 percent at independence to its current level of about 19 percent today. And incomes rose so fast that by 1990 Botswana was reclassified from a low-income country to a middle income one, with average incomes of around $7,240 per person.

Then came the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Batswana who had become teachers and accountants and other professionals suddenly started dying off.....coincidence?

But Joy Phumpahi was Botswana's Health Minister in the late 1990s and early 2000s says that Botswana's practice of using its diamond money for public investment made it that much easier for her to convince the government to back an unprecedented plan.

Essentially they bought HIV/AIDS drugs for every citizen who was infected.

And yet today there's concern that diamonds are still the only big industry Botswana has. It accounts for such a disproportionate share of the budget, 35% in 2016, which is sort of the Achilles heel of the economy. Sadly, the I.M.F., World Bank and other Western "advisors" keep recommending a situation which adversely affects Botswana's traditional hunter-gatherer Bushman communities. Indeed the group Survival International has charged that the government in conjunction with the diamond mining industry has pushed many of these tribesmen off their land and at times subjected them to arrest and torture.

How many more Africans have to die so Westerners can pretend to a romanticism that the prejudice in their societies belies?

黒人浪人