Following the financial
disaster of the King’s
Super Cup football competition that may have lost millions of
emalangeni in public money; King Mswati III of Swaziland is now plundering more
state funds to sponsor his own golf tournament.
On Thursday (13 August
2015) it was announced
that the King’s Golf Tournament would be sponsored for E1.2 million
(US$120,000). Among the sponsors are the parastatal Swaziland Posts and
Telecommunications Corporation (SPTC) and the state-owned Swaziland Electricity
Company.
Hardly anyone in
Swaziland plays golf. Seven in 10 people live in abject poverty with incomes
less than US$2 a day.
The King’s Golf
Tournament is in its 11th year and generally is an opportunity for
King Mswati III, who rules Swaziland as sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute
monarch, to get favourable publicity in the international media.
The main sponsor of the tournament
with E350,000 is MTN, the cell phone company that has a monopoly of business in
Swaziland. It secured this favourable position by giving King Mswati 10 percent
of its shares in its Swaziland subsidiary. It is
reported that MTN paid E114 million (US$11.4 million) to the King over the
past five years.
SPTC has put E280 000
into the golf tournament this year, which is an increase of E30,000 on 2014. Swaziland
Electricity Company’s sponsorship amounted to E150,000.
The King’s Super Cup
football tournament held on 18 July 2015 received E5.8 million of public money,
taken from the budgets of a number of government departments. It was intended the
money would be repaid from receipts on the day, but only about 10,000
spectators turned up.
See also
SWAZI KING’S CUP FINANCIAL DISASTER
MTN KEEPS SWAZI KING IN ITS POCKET
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