POOR CHILDREN IN SWAZI JAIL

Two children have been jailed in Swaziland for being vagrants.

The boys, who were offered the chance to pay fines of E100 each (about 14 US Dollars), were too poor to pay so were taken off to prison for 30 days.

The Times of Swaziland reported (18 April 2008) that the boys, who ‘lived’ in the bush near a disused motel, were believed to be part of a gang who had been ‘terrorising’ people with robbery.

The Times did not say how old the boys were (typically, in the Swazi media even the most basic of information gets overlooked by reporters) but it was stated that their case had been adjourned so that their parents or guardians could turn up to court. This means that they were clearly not adults.

When parents or guardians failed to appear, the boys were tried nonetheless and convicted under the Vagrancy Act of 1963.

By coincidence on the same day Swazi Observer columnist Ackel Zwane wrote that ‘100 percent’ of the people in prison in Swaziland at present were from the 20 percent poorest people in the kingdom. Wealthy people never go to jail, he wrote.

‘There is a hungry boy from kaKhoza who snatches a purse in town and is rotting at Zakhele Remand Centre.

‘He has been there for the past 18 months and is likely to stay even longer before he is sentenced. There was only E10 in that purse. A government official with accomplices stole E50million from the state [from a job creation scheme] but they are roaming the streets and bragging about how sweet money can be.’

Poverty is in the news in Swaziland at the moment. This is not because 70 per cent of the approximately one million population of Swaziland earn less than one US Dollar (E7) a day and 600,000 of them rely on international food aid to avoid starvation, but rather because King Mswati III has jetted off to a ‘poverty summit’ in Mauritius. At the summit he is expected to talk about Swaziland’s poverty reduction strategy.

This is not the first (and probably not the last) poverty summit he has attended. Last August (2007) the king went to Malaysia for similar talks. While there a foreign reporter asked him how many poor people there were in Swaziland and the king replied that he did not know – he would have to ask his minister.

Here’s a fact – courtesy of Zwane – the richest 20 percent in Swaziland own 60 percent of the national income. The poorest 20 percent own 4 percent.

Another fact – courtesy of Forbes magazine, New York – King Mswati III is estimated to have a net worth of 200million US Dollars (E1.4billion) and is the 15th richest monarch in the world and the richest in sub-Saharan Africa.