JAN 19 FOURTH LARGEST DIAMOND EVER FOUND IN LESOTHO

JAN 19  FOURTH LARGEST DIAMOND EVER FOUND IN LESOTHO

Big news out of Africa! An enormous diamond was unearthed in Lesotho last week. How big is it? About the size of baseball, weighing in at 6.4 ounces. Here's the amazing part: It clocks in at a whopping 910-carats. In the history books, that's good for fourth place on the list of largest diamonds ever found. (The largest, the 3,106-carat Cullinan Diamond, weighed over a pound. It was presented to Edward VII in 1903. He proceeded to chop it up. It's now littered throughout the Crown Jewels in London.)

Back to the current specimen. Here are some more specifics about the diamond. The rock has a D-color, which means it's a rare, completely colorless diamond. It's classified as Type IIA. Such diamonds have no boron or nitrogen impurities and account for only 1% of all diamonds mined worldwide. The press release by Gem Diamond calls the stone an "exceptional, top-quality find." How much will it sell for? Ben Davis, an analyst for Liberum Capital, estimates it will fetch around $40 million.

What a great windfall for the impoverished nation of Lesotho! Guess again. The Letseng Mine is owned and operated by Gem Diamonds, a London based conglomerate with a net income of £212 million. (Oh, and their stock rose 15% after the find.) Nope, the corporation will sell the diamond and happily pocket every last shilling. Let's face it: Nine of the ten diamonds on the list were found in Africa and taken elsewhere. The Cullinan and three others are from South Africa, while the rest originally lived Sierra Leone, Congo and Botswana.

To be clear: Gem Diamonds does adhere to international regulations with regard to their local employees in Lesotho. However, their track record in nearby Botswana isn't so spotless. Here, the San People (Bushmen) are primarily nomadic. This makes it much easier to construct mines, as the land has no permanent residents and cannot be claimed by the San. Lawsuits are pending. The big problem here is this "business first, people later" attitude toward mining. It wrecks havoc across the continent. Everyone agrees: Blood Diamonds are a shameful smear on the morality of the Western world.

In short, the discovery and immediate removal of the amazing diamond from Lesotho is a sad reminder that the dreaded structure of colonialism is still alive and well in Africa. Whether it's diamonds in Lesotho, oil in Nigeria, natural gas in Niger, cacao in Ghana, rubber in Tanzania or Egyptian cotton, the result is the same. Western corporations still take the lion share of the profits on African commodities today. It only adds insult to injury when a world leader calls these nations "Shithole Countries." When will this degrading cycle ever be broken?