The editor of Swaziland’s only independent daily newspaper is predicting violence on the streets as the economic meltdown facing the kingdom bites.
Mbongeni Mbingo, the recently-appointed editor of the Times of Swaziland, predicts that once Finance Minister Majozi Sithole starts to cut taxes to pay for the E 4 billion (530 million US dollars) shortfall in the kingdom’s income received from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) the people will ‘begin to revolt’.
This week the Royal Swaziland Police announced it was to buy five dogs from Zimbabwe in a package costing 210,000 US dollars.
The police believe the dogs can be used for combating crime and for sniffing out drugs. In Zimbabwe such dogs have been set on people demonstrating for democracy.
Mbingo, writing in his own newspaper, says the government is ready to unleash the dogs, ‘because there is going to be a lot of protesting and violence can be expected to spill all over the place once Majozi starts doing his business of heavily taxing the working public-the few who are working anyway’.
He writes, ‘What this means is that given the way things are, we can expect that the anger is going to spill over, and government is now getting ready for a fight.’
He predicts that not only will working people suffer but members of Swaziland’s middle class ‘who enjoy what’s left of the crumbs’ will start to get ‘restless too’.
He says, ‘The iceberg is nearing, the titanic is heading for disaster. Suddenly they will realise what we have always meant when we said we are heading for Zimbabwe.’
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