SWAZILAND ECONOMY ON THE SKIDS

A decision by the Swazi Government to increase the salaries of civil servants could not have come at a worse time.

Just as the Swazi media were reporting that government was to spend an extra E300 million (more than 4 million US dollars) on civil servants pay comes a survey from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that states, ‘When the rest of sub-Saharan Africa was growing over the last decade, the economy of the Kingdom of Swaziland stagnated.’

The report published in IMF Survey Magazine on Monday (28 July 2008) states, ‘The slow growth may have worsened already difficult conditions in the tiny, landlocked country where in 2001, the latest year for which there are data, about two-thirds of its 1 million residents lived in poverty and 20 percent of the population claimed two-thirds of the income.’

The report identifies a number of issues that need to be addressed, including reforms in the banking and finance sector.

Chief among the problems facing Swaziland is the size of the kingdom’s civil service. The IMF report calls on Swaziland to ‘scale back government’ and reduce wage bills. This will in time allow ‘government to fight HIV AIDS’ and promote investment.

None of this is new. For many years the IMF has been calling on the Swazi government to modify its economy, by allowing wealth to be more evenly distributed within the kingdom, to reform land policy so the people (and not the Swazi king) can own and control the land and to cut back the unnecessarily large civil service.

As I have written before the government ignores this advice and continues to mislead Swazis into believing the economy is improving when it is not.

Earlier this month (July 2008) the state-controlled radio SBIS reported Prime Minister Themba Dlamini saying that the Swazi economy was in good health and that the PM was looking forward to an IMF report that would confirm this health.

I don’t know which IMF report he had in mind, but it certainly isn’t this one.

To see the full IMF report click here.

See also
FALSEHOODS ON THE SWAZI ECONOMY