De Beers back in Angola, the ‘best place on planet Earth to explore for diamonds’

6 Feb 2024

De Beers is making a pivot back to Angola where it sees the best chances to make a major diamond discovery. Growing transparency in a government that was once a byword for oil-linked corruption has helped to pave the road back to Luanda.

De Beers, the diamond giant and Anglo American unit, signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Angola on Tuesday which aims to boost exploration and production activities.

“It sets out key areas where the parties agree to work together to consider shared initiatives. These include reviewing a number of kimberlite deposits to reassess their economic attractiveness through the application of new De Beers technologies, promoting the transparency and traceability of diamond production, and identifying opportunities to build local community capacity by leveraging De Beers Group’s Building Forever sustainability framework,” De Beers said.

The MoU, which was signed at the Mining Indaba in Cape Town, builds on the company’s current footprint in Angola, which it returned to in 2022 after a 10-year absence.

De Beers CEO Al Cook told Daily Maverick in an interview that Angola would now be the focal point of the company’s exploration activities.

“We are increasingly focusing our exploration goals on Angola,” said Cook, a geologist by training.

So, why Angola?

“Angola is probably the best place on planet Earth to explore for diamonds. I’m romantic about exploration and if we are going to find a great new diamond mine — and we need to because supply is running out — we need to look in the best places to find them, and that’s Angola,” Cook said.

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The administration of President João Lourenço has been wooing investors to Angola’s mining industry and other sectors in a bid to diversify an economy that has long been heavily reliant on oil.

His predecessor, José Eduardo dos Santos, who stepped down in 2017 and died in 2022, ruled Angola with an iron fist for decades. His government was widely accused of corruption on a grand scale — a state of affairs fuelled by petrol dollars.

Lourenço has made anti-corruption a centrepiece of his administration and while the jury remains out on the effectiveness of the campaign, Luanda is making progress on several fronts.

Spatial Dimension, a provider of mapping services including mining cadastres, announced this week that it would be providing such a service for Angola.

Cook also pointedly noted that Angola had joined the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).

“What we’ve seen under the leadership of the current government is a continual rising of standards around transparency and standards around good governance. We are in a space where we can imagine that we can sell a diamond from Angola with pride,” Cook said.

“The breakthrough for us was Angola joining the EITI — that was a big step forward.”

On the exploration front, Cook said finding promising kimberlites was becoming increasingly difficult.

“There has only been one significant diamond discovery in the 21st century,” Cook said. And that was in Angola.

“The easy-to-find kimberlites have been found. We found one of our kimberlites in Botswana by looking at where termites had gone down into the earth and brought up tell-tale minerals. But the places on Earth where you can use termites to do your job for you are long gone,” he said. DM

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