Swaziland is on the verge of economic collapse, its people are being cut down by HIV AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) and what is King Mswati III’s solution to this? He wants there to be more Swazi billionaires.
I say ‘more’ because we know he has a personal fortune estimated at 200 Million US dollars which at the current exchange rate puts him over the top at E1.58 billion.
King Mswati reckons other people in Swaziland should come and join him Well all right, he didn’t quite say it that way, but he did say that people who already had money should go out and get even more.
But, unlike himself, King Mswati, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, doesn’t want the new billionaires to steal it from the Swazi people; he wants them to be more entrepreneurial.
The king was speaking at the Entrepreneur of the Year awards ceremony on Friday night (30 October 2009) when he told the audience that the entrepreneurs that currently exist must thrive and look at more ways to make money instead of being content with what they already had.
According to the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by the king, he said ‘he was amazed at how much drive the billionaires of the Middle East he met while touring the region recently had to make more money’.
The king seems to have got a little carried away with his experience of rubbing shoulders with the rich. ‘In my trips abroad I met very rich people, very rich. They have lots and lots of money but they are always looking at new ways of making more money. The way they behave you would swear they have nothing, but they have a lot of money,’ the Observer reported him saying.
The newspaper doesn’t tell us how the creation of billionaires would help the ordinary Swazi people (seven in ten live in abject poverty earning less than one US dollar a day). Maybe King Mswati has a cunning plan. Who knows? Because so far all he has shown is that he wants to support greedy rich people get even richer.
Some leadership.
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