Rattled, the pastor climbed back into his 4×4 and took off down the road, all too aware of the fact that his credibility as a man, a miner and a pastor was precariously balanced on the integrity of an institution riddled with corruption. But if it goes wrong, you will get the blame.” If everything goes well, we will thank you for your good work. “They say we will benefit nothing from this diamond.” The village midwife, who serves as the de facto doctor despite having no training, made it clear to Momoh she held him accountable: “We are all looking to you, our brother, our pastor. “The surrounding villages are mocking us,” lamented an elderly resident. Momoh, who has moved to Freetown but was back to visit, grimaced under the onslaught. Residents gathered under the shade of a large tree to air their frustrations over the slow pace of development. The village well, installed by an NGO a decade ago, had dried up, and women and children trekked almost a mile to fetch water from a stream for their daily needs. The village, a small scattering of concrete huts with palm-leaf roofs, lies at the end of a severely rutted road that is all but impassable during the rainy season. When TIME visited Koryardu in March, a year after the diamond was found, residents were already beginning to suspect that they had indeed been taken for fools.
He wasted his money by giving his diamond to the government.’” “If it doesn’t, and this is a fact, the people will say, ‘Pastor Momoh, he was a fool. “If the government does what it promised to do, it will improve people’s confidence,” says Abu Brima, executive director of the Network Movement for Justice and Development, a civil-society organization that works with Sierra Leone’s mining sector. In a country where corruption and governance are all but synonymous-Sierra Leone ranks 130 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index-it offers a rare opportunity for citizen oversight and accountability. With the sale, citizens of Sierra Leone knew for the first time exactly how much a large diamond sold for, how much money went to the government, how much to the men who found it and how much-$980,454-the government had pledged to invest in the community where it was discovered. It was far less than even government evaluators expected, but it garnered something much more valuable: transparency.
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4, 2017, the diamond sold to British jeweler Laurence Graff for $6,536,360 in an auction managed pro bono by Rapaport. This is the first known case of a significant percentage of a diamond’s true market value going to the people who found it and not dealers or middlemen-something that has so far eluded even big diamond companies such as Brilliant Earth, De Beers and Tiffany. In return, the government put the diamond up for public auction and promised that a portion of the proceeds-exactly 15%-would help provide new roads, schools, electricity and clean water systems around Koryardu, the village in Kono district where Johnbull found the stone. But he has no regrets, he says, adding, “I did the right thing.
In handing the diamond over to the government, which by law had the right to 60% of the proceeds from its sale, Pastor Emmanuel Momoh knew he would be losing the lion’s share of the diamond’s value. His mining sponsor, a local pastor who paid for the five-man team’s tools, food and medical care in exchange for a majority stake in whatever they found, took the diamond straight to a government representative, bypassing the usual smuggling route that is the way many major diamonds leave the country. “People were telling me that it would sell for $50, $70 million.”
“We thought we would become the richest persons in the world,” recalls Johnbull, speaking to TIME a year after the diamond was discovered. Weighing 709 carats, it was the third largest diamond ever unearthed in Sierra Leone, and the 15th largest in the world. But what Johnbull found on March 13, 2017, may have upended that narrative.
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