IS SWAZILAND KING SENT BY GOD?

All right, can we sort this out once and for all: is King Mswati sent by God?

I ask because there seems to be a campaign underway in Swaziland to convince us that he is.

I wrote on Wednesday (21 October 2009) about Lufto Dlamini, Swaziland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, his excruciating poetry and his statement that the king was ‘ordained by God to lead his people’.

Now, the acting ‘traditional’ prime minister Timothy Velabo Mtsetfwa has joined in.

Mtsetfwa reckoned, ‘Royalty was a gift from God’. He said this while urging the Swazi nation ‘to respect the Royalty because it cares for the needy’ (no I promise you, he really said this).

Perhaps, King Mswati would care to clear up this matter. Does he know God personally and if he agrees with Dlamini and Mtsetfwa could he tell us exactly why he was sent to Swaziland, rather than some place on Earth more significant?

Of course, we know the king wasn’t sent by God, but it is worrying if he believes that he was. A spell in a psychiatric hospital would be in order.

I suspect what’s happening is that the Swazi people are being softened up. The ruling elite, aided and abetted by the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati, seem to be gearing up for a fight over multi-party democracy in Swaziland (the king, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, opposes it).

If the Swazi people can be made to believe that King Mswati speaks the word of God how could they speak against him?

Mtsetfwa also spoke about how multi-parties ‘were a monster to which many countries had succumbed and fell’. He then went on to say, ‘in other countries, especially those under multi-party democracy, the leaders only think of themselves and their immediate families and forget about the needy people’. How odd, since Mtsetfwa has perfectly described the situation in Swaziland where all parties are banned.

Mtsetfwa then went on to say ‘many countries envy the Swazi nation’. All right Mtsetfwa, name three of them.