WHO DARES CRITICISE THE KING?

Has Swaziland suddenly become a free country? Is it now possible to say anything you like about the king without fearing for your safety?

I ask these questions after reading last week’s Times Sunday (30 September 2007) where two comment writers criticised the king.

The first was Dumisani Hlophe who stated quite clearly that the king should be ‘responsible and accountable for either the good or the ugly that may happen in Swaziland.’ He added, ‘I think, at some point or another, society must lay responsibility for some of the major decisions at the feet of the king.’

He wrote that people constantly blame the king’s advisors when bad decisions are made. This is not true, he wrote, ‘At what point should society lay responsibility at the feet of His Majesty?’ The reason why people don’t criticise the king, Dumisani concludes, is that they fear they will be arrested for articulating a contradictory position to the king.

But, Dumisani goes on, the king is head of state and as head of state he should be held accountable for the decisions and actions of the state.

The second comment article, this one by Musa Hlophe, was less critical, but he did attack the dual legal system that exists in Swaziland. This gives ‘traditionalists’ the power to overrule decisions made by government. These traditionalists are scaring potential investors away from Swaziland, he says.

Musa called on the king to ignore their advice. ‘The king has absolute control in deciding whether Swaziland can be freed from the grip of the traditionalist elite’, Musa writes.

‘So long as the government of the day has no power to run the country, then no amount of empty apologies will change our circumstances. In fact, I may add that no amount of breakfast meetings with the prime minister, who has no freedom to run the country, will change our circumstances for the better,’ he adds.

I found these two articles remarkable because there is no history of free speech about the king in Swaziland. King Mswati III holds all the power and no criticisms of the king are tolerated. Who can forget what happened after the Times Sunday published a report in March 2007 from the Afrol news agency that suggested that economic and social problems facing Swaziland stemmed from the private spending of the king?

The paper and its stablemate publication the Times of Swaziland were forced into issuing grovelling apologies, saying that this type of criticism was entirely out of order and that the report was ‘disparaging to the person of His Majesty in its content, greatly embarrassed him and should not have passed editorial scrutiny’.

King Mswati III has succeeded in censoring the newspapers in Swaziland on a number of occasions. For example in May 2006 he banned newspapers from writing about his wives without his permission, even while covering official events, after the Times Sunday interviewed one of his wives (with her consent) while she was sick in hospital. This was the second time in 12 months that the Swazi king gagged the media from reporting about royalty. It should be noted that this ban was not reported within Swaziland.

This banning by the king simply continued a trend that had been operating since before the new constitution, for example, in 2005, the king ordered the media to stop writing about his lavish spending after newspapers published that he had purchased US$500,000 worth of luxurious vehicles for his 13 wives.

The Swazi press seem to have heeded his orders. In August 2007 Forbes.com reported that King Mswati III was the richest monarch in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Forbes estimates his net worth to be 200 million US dollars (one billion four hundred thousand Swazi emalangeni). The news appeared in the foreign media, but I have never seen a single reference to this in the Swazi media.

I doubt that there is a new freedom of expression abroad in Swaziland. We must now wait to see what consequences the Times Sunday face for its publication.