Did he resign or was he sacked? That’s the big question now surrounding the departure of Ndumiso Mamba as Justice Minister after he was discovered having an affair with one of the wives of King Mswati III of Swaziland.
An official statement issued today (5 August 2010) by Barnabas Dlamini, the illegally-appointed Prime Minister, said Mamba ‘resigned’ as Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister. No reason was given, but everyone (except those living inside Swaziland with no access to international media) knows that Mamba and the king’s 12th wife, Nothando Dube, (also known as Inkhosikati LaDube) were discovered having sex together last week, while the king was abroad.
Yesterday, the king returned to Swaziland from a trip to Taiwan and today Mamba was out of office.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see the dead hand of the king in all of this.
The Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN) certainly does. In a statement it said, ‘King Mswati has resorted to his infamous childish antics by imposing his private matters on the state when he fired his Justice Minister for having an affair with his twelfth wife, LaDube. There is nothing new about this as he also forced the two previous speakers of parliament to resign, one for stealing cow dung and the other for having also sexually been involved with another one of his wives.’
SSN goes on, ‘It is extremely shameful that in a country where ministers can fail to deliver in their duties dismally and get away with it, it takes only a few days to dismiss the head of an entire ministry for a matter that has absolutely nothing to do with matters of state.’
SSN has a point. If every Swaziland minister or member of parliament was forced to resign because they had sex with someone who was not their wife (or in some cases wives) there would hardly be a member still left in kingdom.
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