A report published in King
Mswati’s newspaper saying
Swaziland needs to double the size of its police force to meet international standards is wide of
the mark.
In fact, the kingdom,
ruled by King Mswati as an absolute monarch and criticised in the international
community as a ‘police state,’ needs fewer police if it is to meet the
standards in Africa.
The Swazi Observer reported on Thursday (16 July 2015) that the current ratio
in Swaziland stands at one police officer for every 500 people in Swaziland. It
said the correct ratio ‘for international standards’ should be one for every
250 people.
The
figure was given at
workshop to discuss the Royal Swaziland Police strategic plan 2016-2020.
No
evidence was given to support these figures. If the statistics are true
it would mean the Swazi police force would need to double in size to
meet international standards.
In Swaziland they tend to
make it up as they go along when it comes to identifying police needs in the
kingdom.
For example, in 2013
Swaziland’s Prime Minister Barnabas Dlamini and his press secretary Percy
Simelane were unable to agree on the number of police in Swaziland.
Dlamini told newspaper editors at a meeting that there was one police
officer to every 700 people in Swaziland, but the figures were ‘supposed to be’
one officer to every 200 people.
This, he said, meant that
Swaziland needed to employ more police to avoid compromising security. He said
Swaziland must not reduce the security budget.
However Simelane told the Times of Swaziland the accepted international ratio was one officer
to every 400 people (half the number the PM came up with).
To try to sort out the
confusion, the Times published figures from the 2012/2013 Establishment Register from the Ministry of
Public Service that showed the kingdom had 4,329 police officers.
It also found that the
Central Statistical Office for the year 2012/2013 put the population of
Swaziland at 1,055,506.
Based on these figures,
the ratio of police officers to people in Swaziland was one officer to 244, the
newspaper concluded.
The figure supplied by
the Times contradicted the Prime
Minister’s claim in Swaziland there was only one officer to 700 people.
The Times went on to say that based on Simelane’s claim that there
needed to be one officer for every 400 people, in Swaziland the police service
was overstaffed by 1,690 officers.
But Dlamini and Simelane were
both wrong. A United Nations- published report International Statistics on Crime and Justice demonstrates there is no global average ratio
for police to population. However, it shows in Africa, the median average
number of police officers to population is 187 officers per 100,000
people.
If that figure applied to
Swaziland there should be 1,973 police officers in the kingdom, not the 4,329
there are, according to the Establishment Register. To meet the average for
Africa, Swaziland would need to sack 2,356 officers.
People in Swaziland are
suspicious of the motives in demanding more money be spent on increasing police
numbers. Swaziland has been criticised for resembling a police or military
state.
In 2013,the
Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) reported
that Swaziland police and state security forces had shown
‘increasingly violent and abusive behaviour’ that was leading to the
‘militarization’ of the kingdom.
OSISA
told
the African Commission
on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) meeting in The Gambia, ‘There are also
reliable reports of a general militarization of the country through the
deployment of the Swazi army, police and correctional services to clamp down on
any peaceful protest action by labour or civil society organisations ahead of
the country’s undemocratic elections.’
Again in 2013, after
police broke up a meeting to discuss the pending election, the meeting’s joint organisers, the Swaziland United Democratic Front (SUDF) and
the Swaziland Democracy Campaign (SDC), said Swaziland no longer had a national
police service, but instead had ‘a private militia with no other purpose but to
serve the unjust, dictatorial, unSwazi and ungodly, semi-feudal royal
Tinkhundla system of misrule’.
See also
SWAZI POLICE NOW ‘A PRIVATE MILITIA’
SWAZILAND ‘BECOMING MILITARY STATE’
http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2013/04/swaziland-becoming-military-state.html
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