Cutting and polishing diamonds locally crucial

The African continent has been the source of all sorts of raw materials – feeding other economies to produce manufactured goods. Exporting of raw materials is not a sustainable strategy to build resilient economies.
These sentiments were shared by the Minister of Mines and Energy Tom Alweendo at the official inauguration of the Finestar factory in Windhoek on Friday.
In his keynote address, Alweendo notes that in order to have a flourishing diamond cutting and polishing industry, there is a need for full collaboration with those companies that have invested in the industry.
In 1994, the Government took a decision to capture as much value as possible from diamond mining sector by requiring that a certain percentage of the diamonds must be cut and polished within the local economy.
“The current arrangement is that, for certain justifiable operational reasons, companies can be allowed to export a certain percentage of the diamonds they have purchased from the Namibia Diamond Trading Company (NDTC) in rough.”
This was done to allow companies time to improve their operational efficiencies such that all their purchased diamonds are cut and polished locally.
“We have, however, observed that some of the companies tend to abuse this concession and continues to export diamonds in rough form, instead of doing the cutting and polishing locally. We will start to be stricter with the conditions under which this concession can be utilised; and will demand that all diamonds purchased from the NDTC are cut and polished locally,” he cautioned.
“The local cutting and polishing industry is also likely to flourish only when we have all the needed skills available locally; from the lowly skilled ones to the most highly skilled ones. In this respect, we wish to encourage companies to take the issue of skills transfer seriously, especially high-level skills,” Alweendo said.
Diamond mining plays an important role in the Namibian economy, representing 25% of exports from the mining sector. In the 2020/21 fiscal year almost 20% of corporate tax came from the diamond industry.
There are currently eleven (11) active cutting and polishing companies and employs over 900 people. [email protected]