Maatla Kgasa: Give Botswana A Diamond Museum

“This might sound crazy, but hear me out first, 4 of the 5 largest diamonds in the world have come out of Botswana. Since we have failed at diamond beneficiation(cutting, polishing, making jewelry) , we have to consider keeping one of these rare diamonds and build a world class Museum around one or two diamonds.

Build a hotel, a diamond theme park, restaurants and let white people come to Botswana to see some of these diamonds in display and charge them an $80 entrance fee to just see the diamond displayed in a bullet proof vase.. Instead of selling a 1000 carat diamond at $75 million, let’s keep it, take P250 million and build a tourism ecosystem around the stone. These one off transaction are not sustainable, especially now that synthetic diamonds are breathing on our neck.

What makes business sense? Selling your elephants one by one or keeping them, building a game reserve and sell them white to tourists 2 eye balls a time. Tourism is just a rented experience.

It’s essentially the same thing,we don’t sell our wild Animals because they make us more more money when we keep them. So let’s build a Game Reserve, but for diamonds.

Disney World is built around the same concept. Our idea of diamond beneficiation should shift towards diamond tourism. I guarantee you we would make a killing there.

A world class diamond theme park, arcades, bowling alleys, hotels, spas, indoor climbing, restaurants and a well curated diamond museum with a cinema that animates the diamond mining process and shows you visual presentations of all our mines. A world class resort. Oh boy. We are sitting on a gold mine, or rather diamond mine. Literally. That is how you diversify the economy , use what you have and milk it, our greatest economic contributors are diamonds and tourism, combine the two and you have hit the sweet spot”.