Swazi Media Commentary: SWAZI SUGAR WORKERS EXPLOITED

The Swaziland Sugar Association which has celebrated its 50^th anniversary misled the world when it congratulated itself but ignored the suffering of workers in the industry.

Sugar in Swaziland is controlled by the conglomerate Tibiyo TakaNgwane which is supposed to hold a number of business for the benefit of the Swazi people.

Tibiyo Managing Director Absalom Dlamini told a banquet that 16,000 people were employed in the sector and this was ‘one of the most remarkable accomplishments in the sector in the past 50 years’.

The Swazi Observer newspaper, which is also owned by Tibiyo, reported on Friday (29 September 2017), ‘He said the benefits have spilled over to indirect beneficiaries including spouses, children, parents and relatives of the people employed in the value chain.

‘Also, Dlamini said the sugar industry has made inroads in building capacity for many Swazis to take up highly specialised positions in the sector, including at leadership and other decision making levels.’

His remarks were far from the truth as a report published in 2016 by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) demonstrates.

The report called King Mswati’s Gold showed that the absolute monarch of Swaziland uses sugar profits to finance his own lavish lifestyle. Sugar cane production has brought about more human suffering than development in Swaziland. Many people have been evicted and the general conditions in the sugar industry are atrocious, the report concluded.

As Peter Kenworthy reported in October 2016, Swaziland’s main export commodity is sugar, the so-called ‘Swazi gold’. With a population of only 1.3 million people, Swaziland is nevertheless the 4th largest sugar producer in Africa. Sugar production accounts for almost 60 percent of Swaziland’s agricultural output and 18 percent of Swaziland’s GDP. The biggest market for Swazi sugar is the European Union (although the duty-free and quota-guaranteed access to the EU market will end in 2017).

According to Manqoba Nxumalo, who authored the report, one would therefore expect that the wealth generated from sugar sales would lead to improving living standards for the Swazi population.

‘But as our research was able to prove, it is only a feeding ranch for the royal family. Sugar has been the primary locomotive by which they have mutated from a backward aristocracy to a new comprador class,’ says Nxumalo.

According to the report, the problems all lead back to a 1973 royal decree that banned political parties, criminalized political activism and vested all power in the King, thereby transforming Swaziland from a thriving constitutional democracy to royal dictatorship.

The decree thus created an absolute monarchy that was able to use its control over Swaziland’s wealth through companies such as Tibiyo Taka Ngwane to control the nation, the report concludes.

King Mswati is the sole trustee of Tibiyo, which was initially created as a national trust. Today, however, ‘income from Tibiyo’s present worth around US$ 2 billion supports King Mswati … Like Mswati, Tibiyo is immune from taxation.

World sugar production has doubled in 30 years, and Mswati – who Forbes estimates has a personal wealth of around US$200 million – has become personally rich from Swazi sugar. The thousands of workers who produce the sugar, on the other hand, have seen little of this wealth.

King Mswati, as the sole trustee of Tibiyo, is both a head of state and a businessman unfairly competing with local and foreign businesses. The workers, who work in Tibiyo-aligned companies, on the other hand live in squalor and abhorring conditions, especially in the sugar industry.

King Mswati, and his father Sobhuza before him, have evicted and forcefully relocated villagers from their lands without compensation to make way for Tibiyo-controlled sugar-cane fields, the report says.

So being employed on one of the large-scale Tibiyo-owned farms as a returning seasonal worker or casual employee has become a necessary alternative to working one’s own fields, although it is a hard and accident-prone job where chemicals such as roundup used to destroy weeds also destroys the people employed to spray the weeds.

According to the report, casual employees make an average of US$5.32 per day – hardly enough to pay for school fees for their children or, proper food or medicine – and are not paid for overtime. They also receive no pension benefits or medical aid.

As unemployment levels in Swaziland are over 40 percent, and the alternative to a job is poverty and often starvation, many Swazis do not complain.

But sugar cane farmers in the impoverished area of Vuvulane have decided that enough is enough. According to the report, there is an ongoing battle between sugar cane farmers in the area and the Royal Swaziland Sugar Corporation.

In February 2016, 22 Vuvulane farmers were evicted from lands that they and their families had tended since 1963 by Vuvulane Irrigated Farms and the Swaziland Sugar Corporation.

Such forced evictions have led to farmers storming Tiboyo-run farms, in an attempt to ensure their livelihoods and the burning of vast areas of Tibiyo-run sugar cane fields in connection with another round of evictions.

Swazi Media Commentary

Monday, 2 October 2017

SWAZI SUGAR WORKERS EXPLOITED

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