DIRTY DIAMOND INDUSTRY: In Sierra Leone, Millions in Diamonds, Little for the People

by Sarah Spencer

The drive from Freetown to Koidu, in the heart of Sierra Leone’s Diamond District, is not for the weak-hearted. Land Rovers bearing the seal of a good-doing NGO, Mercedes which appear to predate Berlin’s division and eighteen-wheelers all scramble over loosely-bound bridges of old cotton trees and through mud that threatens to suck the tires off any vehicle and swallow it whole.

After twelve hours of punishing roads, travelers arrive in Koidu: anonymous, aggressive, and decidedly male. A once-bustling metropolis that’s been torn to pieces by ten years of war, Koidu now has the feel of a small West African town with the rancor of a capital city – picture America’s Wild West or California during the Gold Rush, that is, without Ma and Pa Ingalls. Unemployed youth wade through muddied pools of water, shovels and sieves in hand, sifting through mounds of sand in search of diamonds. General merchants in town sell mining tools alongside shiny stereos and bicycles, hoping to lure money from the pockets of miners who’ve found their fortune at the bottom of a muddy pit.

Most of the diamonds mined in Sierra Leone are extracted from alluvial mines where millions of years of erosion and flowing rivers have distributed diamonds throughout a large geographic area. Small, waterlogged pits near these rivers rapidly expand as dozens sift through endless amounts of brown water, sand, silt and clay in search of their golden ticket. As the mines expand, the earth piles up and occasionally these mini-mountains give way, smothering anything caught in its way.

There is little, if any, regulation of the conditions in which the miners work. Many arrive at sunrise and spend the entire days in the mines. By law, one needs a license to mine diamonds in Sierra Leone. These licenses come at a high price both in bribes and government fees. Inevitably this has created conditions of indentured servitude. In some cases, license-holders hire miners, supplying them with the obligatory tools and paying them under US$2 a day and a bowl of rice for their labor. In many other cases, diamonds are mined illegally and sometimes as a communal project facilitated by village leaders. Government agents charged with monitoring the mines may easily look the other way if offered a plot of land or money in exchange.

Until recently, little was done to prevent children from working in the mines. Government legislation now requires Mines Monitors (MMOs) to identify and penalize those who employ children. While important, this legislation has not been uniformly enforced and mines which are less accessible to MMOs often employ children as miners, cooks and porters alike.

In alluvial mining, most of the profits are enjoyed by diamond dealers and exporters, many of whom are of Lebanese-descent. Many of those lucky enough to find a diamond are unaware of their worth on the world market. Needless to say, the middlemen reap huge profit margins. In one reported incident, a diamond dealer paid a miner US$30,000 for a large diamond he had found and promptly sold it to an exporter for US$180,000.

With this much money changing hands, it is reasonable to presume that Sierra Leone has the necessary resources to provide for its more than 5 million citizens. In fact, diamond exports in Sierra Leone are increasing, from US$76 million in 2003 to US$140 million in 2005.

But it is much more difficult to collect revenue from alluvial mines than the well-guarded and contained kimberlite mines where diamonds are extracted from porous rock using advanced machinery. In the same year that Sierra Leone reported diamond exports of US$140 million, the USAID-funded Peace Diamond Alliance suggested that close to $400 million worth of diamonds had actually been extracted. Alluvial mines make smuggling and skirting the law easy as the mines are difficult to monitor and the gem can be extracted with little technical expertise.

An added bonus: diamonds are extremely portable and fit snuggly into the belongings of any passenger boarding a plane for Beirut, Belgium or Switzerland. Some organizations predict that the revenues collected from alluvial mines will never be enough to provide adequate social services for Sierra Leone.

There is an urban legend that echoes around Sierra Leone. After a torrential downpour during the rainy season, a man with little money and few prospects set out to find work. On his way, a rather large pebble in the road caught his eye. When he looked closer, he saw that the pebble was in fact a diamond. He put the stone in his pocket and carried it to a local buyer who gave him $100,000 for the stone. Thus, while the risks are high and the odds slim, the allure of becoming a millionaire overnight draws children and adults alike to the mines each with the hope of being that one person who strikes it rich.

The bottom line: until the government gains full control over its resources and turns this informal economy into a formal one, the miners and other Sierra Leoneans stand to gain little from these natural resources.

(Photos by Sarah Spencer.)

Comments

[Keith McNeill]

The article concludes, "The bottom line: until the government gains full control over its resources and turns this informal economy into a formal one, the miners and other Sierra Leoneans stand to gain little from these natural resourcs." However, the experience in Sierra Leone and other Third World countries is that when the central government gets control of resources, all or most of the benefits go to those who control the government, and little or nothing to the general population. The best alternative would be to build on the system the writer mentions only in passing - communal projects facilitated by village leaders.