There must be an election coming in Swaziland because state-controlled radio station SBIS is allowing the Swazi Prime Minister to tell outrageous falsehoods to the kingdom.
Swaziland Broadcasting and Information Services (SBIS) radio reported yesterday (4 July 2008) that Prime Minister Themba Dlamini said the Swazi economy was in very good shape.
It was so good Dlamini said that Swaziland needed less overseas’ economic aid than many other countries. Things, Dlamini said, would get even better.
SBIS radio, which is in effect a propaganda outfit for the Swazi King Mswati III and his government, reported this without question.
But a moment’s pause for thought would show that the Prime Minister is simply not telling the truth.
Swaziland is a desperately poor kingdom and that’s because the economy is in ruins. About 70 per cent of the population earn less than one US dollar a day. Of those in work large numbers earn almost slave wages. Think of the textile workers whose wages are so low they have to live six to a room and sleep three to a bed.
Then there are the 600,000 people out of a total population in Swaziland of less than one million who had to receive food donated from overseas this year because the government of Swaziland cannot afford to feed them.
About 70 percent of the total income of Swaziland comes from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU). This is income that is entirely outside of the government’s control. It is not raised within the kingdom as such and the amount that comes in through the SACU depends very much on how much trade there is within other countries in southern Africa.
Because the amount of money Swaziland will receive in any year from the SACU is unpredictable it is extremely difficult for the Swazi Government to budget how much it will have to spend on essential services such as health and education.
It is widely predicted within the international financial community that revenues from SACU will fall sharply after the year 2010.
SBIS reported that the prime minister was looking forward to a report from the international Monetary Fund (IMF) that would confirm the health of Swaziland’s economy. This is the same IMF that previously criticised the Swazi Government for spending too much on civil servants salaries. There was no need for so many people to be on the government payroll, the IMF said. The proportion of the total government spending on salaries was too big, the IMF said.
So how did the government respond to this? It used an unexpected windfall of cash from the SACU and increased civil servants’ salaries. This not only wasted the windfall but also meant that in subsequent years the total salaries bill for civil servants would be higher, not lower, as the IMF insisted.
On top of all this Swaziland has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world. It is estimated that about one in three people of working age are infected. This almost certainly means that they will die within the next few years. Apart form the personal tragedy this represents; it is also an economic disaster. One third of the people who would be doing the work that sustains an economy (in farming, in factories, in the retail trade, for example) will be dead.
And there are very few people in Swaziland who will be able to take over from them because the life expectancy of a child born today is barely thirty years.
Swaziland is quite literally dying.
So, if the Prime Minister and his cronies in parliament, who themselves are set to get pensions of up to E9,000 per month (about 1,200 US Dollars) when they are chucked out of office later this year, think everything in the garden is rosy maybe they should get out more.
See also
BATTERED WORKERS SUE SWAZI POLICE
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