In an extensive interview with Rough&Polished, the ADC chairman Dr. M’zée Fula Ngenge argued that the Kimberley Process’s definition of “conflict diamonds” no longer reflects the realities facing African diamond-producing countries today.
The African Diamond Council (ADC) is not challenging the Kimberley Process on procedural grounds alone. Its argument goes deeper: that the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) was designed to address the conflicts of the early 2000s, but has failed to evolve alongside the ways violence, coercion, and exploitation now occur in diamond supply chains.
When the Kimberley Process (KP) was established in 2003, its focus was narrow but clear — preventing diamonds from funding rebel movements seeking to overthrow legitimate governments. That framework made sense in the aftermath of civil wars in Sierra Leone, Angola, and Liberia. According to the ADC, however, it no longer captures the forms of harm that mining communities face today, particularly when violence or abuse is carried out by state actors, embedded in governance systems, or hidden behind legal production.
What follows from the ADC’s critique is not a call for rhetorical change, but a demand that the KP confront realities it has long avoided: state violence, terrorism financing, systemic human rights abuses, and severe environmental harm — all of which, the Council argues, can exist alongside diamonds that still receive a “conflict-free” certificate.
Why “State Violence” Is Central to the ADC’s Argument
One of the ADC’s most pointed criticisms is that the Kimberley Process excludes violence when it is carried out by the state rather than against it. Under current KP rules, diamonds extracted in environments where security forces are implicated in violence, forced removals, or coercive control of mining areas may still be certified, provided no rebel group is involved.
The ADC argues that this creates a fundamental moral and structural contradiction: diamonds linked to violence can be deemed conflict-free simply because that violence is state-sanctioned. For producing communities, the distinction between rebel and state violence is often academic; the impact on livelihoods and safety is the same.
From the Council’s perspective, a certification scheme that cannot address this reality no longer serves its protective purpose.
Terrorism Financing Outside the KP Mandate
The ADC also highlights terrorism financing as a blind spot in the current Kimberley Process framework. In several African regions, illicit diamond flows intersect with broader smuggling networks that fund armed extremist groups operating across borders, often in areas where formal governance is weak.
These groups may not seek to overthrow governments in the conventional sense, but they extract value through intimidation, coercion, and control of informal mining activity. Because the KP definition remains tied to rebel movements, diamonds linked to such activity can pass through the system unchecked.
The ADC argues that this omission is increasingly untenable, particularly as governments, banks, and downstream buyers tighten due-diligence requirements related to terrorism and sanctions compliance.
What the ADC Means by “Systemic Human Rights Abuses”
The Council’s use of the term “systemic human rights abuses” is deliberate. It refers not to isolated incidents, but to persistent patterns that arise when artisanal and small-scale mining is criminalised, rather than formalised, and when enforcement prioritises control over community protection.
These concerns include violence against informal miners, forced displacement, exploitative labour conditions, and the absence of legal pathways for artisanal miners to operate safely and transparently. According to the ADC, such conditions are widely known within the KP community, yet routinely sidelined because they are politically sensitive and difficult to address under a consensus-based governance model.
The result, the Council argues, is that the KP has drifted from its original mandate toward trade facilitation, while ethical accountability has been treated as secondary.
Environmental Harm: The Missing Dimension
Environmental damage is perhaps the most forward-looking — and controversial — element of the ADC’s critique. In many diamond-producing regions, mining has caused long-term ecological harm, including river diversion, contamination, deforestation, and loss of arable land.
These impacts directly affect food security, public health, and long-term economic resilience in mining communities. Yet environmental harm remains far outside the KP’s scope.
The ADC argues that this exclusion is increasingly misaligned with global expectations. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards now influence access to financing, insurance, and key markets. A certification scheme that ignores environmental harm, the Council says, risks becoming irrelevant in a market where ethical sourcing increasingly extends beyond armed conflict alone.
Why Zimbabwe Keeps Appearing in This Debate
Zimbabwe is frequently referenced in discussions about the Kimberley Process, not because it is uniquely problematic, but because it illustrates the limits of the KP’s current mandate more clearly than most producing countries.
Over the past two decades, Zimbabwe’s diamond sector has repeatedly raised questions that fall between the cracks of the Kimberley Process definition — particularly where violence, governance, and human rights concerns intersect with state authority rather than rebel movements. Those issues have been widely documented, debated within KP forums, and acknowledged by multiple stakeholders, even when consensus on corrective action proved elusive.
For the ADC, Zimbabwe functions less as an accusation and more as a case study: an example of how diamonds can be legally certified under KP rules while serious concerns persist about how they are mined, who controls them, and who ultimately benefits. The Council argues that similar dynamics exist, to varying degrees, in other producing regions, but Zimbabwe’s history has made those tensions especially visible.
As Dr. M’zée Fula Ngenge argues, “Zimbabwe was not an outlier, but a ‘stress test’ that clearly exposed the KP’s inability to handle harm inflicted by state power, entrenched systems, or environmental degradation.”
The Core Question the ADC Is Raising
At its heart, the ADC is asking whether the Kimberley Process still describes the world it claims to regulate.
Violence no longer needs a rebel flag to devastate mining communities. Harm can be bureaucratic, militarised, environmental, or quietly systemic. If a certification scheme cannot explicitly identify the harms it seeks to address, it is inherently incapable of preventing them. “The result,” Ngenge warns, “is that the KP now ‘functions less as a safeguard and more as an ethical façade,’ certifying diamonds connected to the very harms it should prevent.”
“This façade is, troublingly, championed by African intergovernmental bodies that opt for a peripheral role as ‘Observers’ within the Kimberley Process (KP) and World Diamond Council (WDC) frameworks,” according to Dr M’zée Fula Ngenge. The ADC Chairman states, “In exchange for a seat at the table, these organizations have become masters at betraying the sovereignty of the nations in whose name they speak.”
This, Dr. Ngenge argues, is why revising the definition of conflict diamonds is not a technical exercise, but a test of whether the Kimberley Process can remain relevant in a changing global diamond market.
