SWAZILAND PM IS IN FANTASY LAND

Swaziland’s illegally-appointed Prime Minister Barnabas Dlamini has said that other countries envy Swaziland politically.

He told a meeting of Swaziland media editors and senior journalists yesterday (29 January 2009) that the only problem Swaziland had was that the international community didn’t understand what life was really like in Swaziland and therefore criticised it through ignorance.

According to a report in the Times of Swaziland today (30 January 2009), Dlamini said ‘other countries always marvelled at the way things were done in the country’.

There is nothing new in Dlamini’s comments. We are often told by Swazis with political power that things are just dandy in Swaziland and everyone likes life in the kingdom, so stop criticising it.

Even the lie that other countries envy Swaziland gets trotted out from time to time. I notice that the prime minister didn’t actually list the countries that are said to envy Swaziland its lack of democracy. In Swaziland, political parties are banned, King Mswati III makes all of the important decisions and the parliament has no real powers.

Seven in ten people live in abject poverty earning less than one US dollar a day while the king has a wealth estimated at 200 million US dollars (about E1.4 billion).

Swaziland has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world and last year six in ten of the kingdom’s population relied on international food aid to avoid starvation.

Now tell me what exactly there is to envy about Swaziland?

People outside of Swaziland are getting to hear the truth about life in the kingdom. By a coincidence of timing, the day that the Swazi Prime Minister was making his absurd claim there appeared a report in a small town newspaper in Greene County, Virginia, in the United States.

The locals had gathered to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama as US President. The Greene County Record newspaper reports, ‘It was Dumisille, a native of Swaziland in Africa, who later best explained the gift of democracy all felt that night.

‘“I grew up in a region where there was no choice in government,” says Dumisille. “You were given a name and told that was who you vote for. I became an American in 1988 and when I first voted I thought “oh my gosh, you mean to tell me I can choose?”’

Not much envy of Swaziland there . . .