At a ceremony in Gaborone on April 23, 2024, Botswana’s Minister of Minerals and Energy, Lefoko Moagi, signed a host country agreement that formalized the terms according to which the newly created Kimberley Process Permanent Secretariat would operate on its territory.
His counterpart signing the agreement was Bojung Tang, the Chinese official who just one month earlier had formally accepted the appointment as the KP’s first Executive Secretary, after having receiving the consensus support of the KP Plenary.
Thus began a new chapter in the 24-year history of the KP, which since its establishment in 2000 had operated without a permanent administrative mechanism, and not a single employee. But also signaled the conclusion of an almost 11-year period, during which essential administrative services to the KP, its Chair and the heads of its various working groups had been provided by what was called an Administrative Support Mechanism (ASM), which had been funded and operated by World Diamond Council members.
The fact that a permanent secretariat was so long in coming was largely due to the fact that the KP has never been a legal entity, but rather an impromptu coalition of countries, industry representatives and civil society bodies, who create and coordinate policies out of a sense of common concern.
The KP’s considerable accomplishments were achieved despite its lack of structure. Functional power was vested in the serving chairs, who were selected through consensus and whose identity and physical location changed from year to year. Each would create an ad hoc secretarial staff, usually made up of civil servants employed by the government of the country in which he or she was located.
But it was an inefficient system, plagued by a steep learning curve that inevitably was created each time the location of the KP chair shifted, and a new group of KP administrators was created. The need for a professional staff had been recognized early on, but the informal structure of the KP and the politicized nature of its decision-making system had made the establishment of such a body complicated.
