It seems that Swazi Prince Masitela (often described by the Swazi media as a ‘senior’ prince) has only just discovered that people in Swaziland are going hungry.
The prince, who is the regional administrator of Manzini, Swaziland’s business capital, now wants the National Disaster and Management Agency to distribute food rations to the hungry.
Masitela said people in urban areas do not have land to plough, unlike people in the rural areas.
I don’t want to be unnecessarily hurtful to the prince but it is obvious to anyone who ever visits an urban area that there are poor and hungry people. How is it that he has only just noticed? I wrote earlier this month about the children who had to give up school to collect tin cans to sell in order (mostly unsuccessfully) to put food on the table.
Any visitor to a shopping complex car park in Swaziland will be aware of the large numbers of often quite small children who ‘sell’ misshapen spoons. Anyone who buys these spoons isn’t making a purchase because they want spoons, it is generally recognised that the spoons are a ‘front’ for begging. Without the generosity of the buyers, these children and their families would starve.
It is well known that over the past year about 650,000 of Swaziland’s one million population have received food aid from international donors.
In the Swazi Observer today (29 October 2008) Masitsela is quoted saying that if the people in urban areas are hungry, they start engaging in crime.
This is almost certainly true, but the bigger crime here is the way in which ordinary people are treated in Swaziland. As I wrote last Friday (24 October 2008) Swaziland isn’t a particularly ‘poor’ country by world standards. The problem is the wealth that is created goes to only a small group of people. And most of it goes to Prince Masitsela and the rest of the Royal Family.
Perhaps one way of solving the hunger problem is to force the prince and his family to give the Swazi people their fair shares.
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