Leading the charge
is the Swazi Observer group of
newspapers that is in effect owned by the King.
The Sunday Observer (25 May 2014) claimed the airport was a
‘heat’ (presumably it meant a ‘hit’) in Botswana. It then manufactured a story
claiming that government ministers from all over Africa, who were in Botswana
for the ANOCA games, ‘praised the standards of the airport’.
In fact, it only
quoted one of them, Sudan’s Minister of Sports, who admitted he had never been
to the airport and had never even visited Swaziland.
The Observer is one of the cheerleaders for
the airport, formerly known as Sikhuphe, which was officially opened in March
2014. No commercial airline has flown in or out of the airport, and none have
said they plan to do so in the future.
Even King Mswati
himself does not use the airport, built at a cost of at least E3 billion
(US$300 million) in a wilderness in southeast Swaziland. He prefers to fly his
private jet from the Matsapha Airport, which is close to both the kingdom’s
capital, Mbabane, and the main commercial city, Manzini.
This is not the
only time recently that the Swazi
Observer has misled its readers about the potential of the airport.
On13 May 2014 it quoted
Swaziland Civil Aviation Authority (SWACAA) Corporate Affairs Director Sabelo Dlamini saying was being
discussed to fly passengers from Swaziland to Durban, South Africa, for onward
flights to Germany and the United Kingdom. The newspaper ignored the fact that
Swazi people wishing to fly to those European destinations can already do so via
Johannesburg.
Dlamini has made
extravagant claims about the potential of the airport in the past. In May 2011,
the Weekend Observer reported him
saying, ‘We have established possible routes which we want to market to the
operators. Some of the proposed routes from Sikhuphe are Durban, Cape Town,
Lanseria Airport in Sandton, Harare and Mozambique.’ But nothing has happened
since.
Dlamini also claimed at
the time that he met with
‘at least five big airline operators’. The newspaper only named three of them; Knysla Tour
Operators, Timeless Ethiopia and
Satoa Tours. None of them were ‘big airline operators’ and since 2011 nothing
has been heard again about them.
In January 2014,
SWACAA placed an
advertisement in newspapers
in Swaziland claiming, ‘Two airlines have confirmed operations at Sikhuphe.’ It
did not name them, but did say there would be flights to Johannesburg, Durban
and Cape Town in South Africa and to Maputo in Mozambique. Nothing has been
heard since.
As recently as
October 2013, a report from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said Sikhuphe International Airport
was widely perceived as a ‘vanity project’ because of its scale and opulence compared
with the size and nature of the market it seeks to serve.
In June 2013, an
engineer’s report was published by to the Mail
and Guardian newspaper in South Africa saying the structure of the airport
was defected and large jet airlines would not be able to
land,
No independent
study on the need for Sikhuphe Airport was ever undertaken and the main impetus
behind its construction has been King Mswati. He believes the airport will lend
credibility to his dream to make Swaziland a ‘First World’ nation by 2022.
In 2003, the International Monetary Fund said Sikhuphe
should not be built because
it would divert funds away from much needed projects to fight poverty in
Swaziland. About seven in ten of King Mswati’s 1.3 million subjects live in abject
poverty, with incomes of less than US$2 per day. Swaziland has the
highest rate of HIV infection in the world. The King has 13 palaces and a
personal fortune once estimated by Forbes
Magazine to be US$200 million. Meanwhile, seven in ten of his subjects live in
abject poverty with an income of less than US$2 a day.
Swaziland already
has an airport at Matsapha, which carries an estimated 70,000 passengers a
year.
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