Thanks to all those people who contacted me to play our new game – Swaziland Fantasy Watch.
This is where we are going to do the Swazi media’s job for them and keep track of all the claims for prestigious new projects that King Mswati III and his hanger-on make.
We know, but the media ignore, that the claims are empty. They are indeed just a fantasy.
I started the game rolling with the King’s Folly - Sikhuphe International Airport. and the claim made this week that ‘one of the world’s leading airlines’, Etihad Airways, wants to use the airport when it is built.
I don’t believe it. Do you?
My readers tell me that the game could have started over a decade ago when King Mswati, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, teamed up with that other fantasist, pop singer Michael Jackson to bring a ‘Netherland-style’ theme park to Swaziland.
Media reports in 1998 said King Mswati personally met with Jackson at Disneyland in the US to try and get him on board.
Jackson had been approached to help shape the ‘multi-million-pound’ Africa theme park, near Manzini. This was part of a Millennium project. Of course the year 2000 came and went and no theme park was built.
Africa Eye News Service reported at the time that the theme park would be part of a complex, which would also include (guess what?) an international airport and a five-star hotel. Have you noticed how every grand scheme planned for Swaziland, such as Swazi City, always includes a top-of-the-range hotel?
Other candidates for the Fantasy Watch game are the funding of a FIFA world standard soccer stadium and technology park that was promised and never arrived and who can forget the creation of the World Class University funded by Korea?
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