Swaziland youth calls for democracy at National Congress

Kenworthy News Media, 18 February 2019

SOURCE

The biggest youth movement in Swaziland, the Swaziland Youth Congress, called for democracy at its 12^th National Congress last weekend. The congress was held in South Africa because of repression in Swaziland against organisations who call for democracy, writes Kenworthy News Media.

The main theme of the first National Congress of the Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO) since 2013 was democracy and “reawakening youth zeal for liberation.”

“We are committed to a peaceful transition from the current dictatorship under the monarchy to a democratic Eswatini [Swaziland]. As young people, we want liberation now, because the injustice to Swazis has long overstayed its time,” says newly elected President Sonkhe Dube.

Dube, a teacher by profession, had told congress that it was an “enormous task to build [SWAYOCO into] an effective organization capable of transforming its beautiful slogans into action.” The congress came at a time when SWAYOCO has been “battered by the regime” in recent years, the organization said in a statement.

In the statement, SWAYOCO also said that it would work with the labour movement and marginalized groups in Swaziland such as the LGBTI-community, and that the organisation was seeking international help to achieve democracy in Swaziland.

Liberation and social justice
SWAYOCO, a member of the International Union of Socialist Youth, was formed in 1991, as the youth league of Swaziland’s largest democratic movement, the People’s United Democratic Movement. Both organisations were proscribed under Swaziland’s Suppression of Terrorism Act, an act that Amnesty International called “inherently repressive” when it was implemented in 2008.

Amongst other things, SWAYOCO has previously launched campaigns against Swaziland’s “undemocratic elections” and for political awareness in Swazi schools, demanded smart sanctions against the country’s royal family, and that the International Criminal Court arrest Swaziland’s absolute monarch King Mswati III.

“The renewal of SWAYOCO will inspire the youth to demand their rights and define their role in the creation of a new kingdom of Eswatini [Swaziland]. We will sell the idea of liberation and social justice to the people,” says President Sonkhe Dube.

Outgoing President Bheki Dlamini agrees. “I am delighted to hand over the baton to other comrades. I have dedicated all my youth to fighting Mswati’s oppression. I shall continue to support the new leadership and the broader struggle for democracy,” Dlamini said.

A dangerous job
Sonkhe Dube has, along with many other SWAYOCO-members, personally experienced Mswati’s oppression. In 2009 and 2011, he was detained and tortured by police at peaceful SWAYOCO rallies. And in 2013, he fled to exile in neighbouring South Africa after again having been arrested by police, tortured and threatened that they would “come back and deal with me.”

Because being a member of SWAYOCO, let alone President, is a dangerous job.

SWAYOCO’s first President Benedict Didiza Tsabedze died in a mysterious car accident next to the royal palace in 1996 after having been taken to the hospital by the police. SWAYOCO member Sipho Jele was found hanged in his cell under mysterious circumstances, after having been arrested for wearing a PUDEMO t-shirt.

Several other former SWAYOCO leaders, including Wandile Dludlu,  Maxwell Dlamini and Bheki Dlamini, have all been tortured by police, detained, and later released without charge. Bheki Dlamini after having spent nearly three years in prison.

SWAYOCO member Zonke Dlamini served a long prison-sentence for charges he insists he only admitted to under torture. And other SWAYOCO members have been beaten up, tear-gassed and shot with rubber bullets by police, as well as detained, shot and killed.

Amnesty International described in 2017 how “repressive legislation” and “politically motivated trials and laws that violate the principle of legality … continue to be used to suppress dissent” in Swaziland.

See also

Youth want democracy in Swaziland

https://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2017/03/youth-want-democracy-in-swaziland.html

 

Swazi law used against human rights

https://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2018/05/swazi-law-used-against-human-rights.html

 

How Swazi state harasses activists

https://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2018/04/how-swazi-state-harasses-activists.html

‘BLAME KING FOR PROBLEMS’- DUBE

Swazi criticism of government at ‘people’s parliament’ is misplaced

Kenworthy News Media, 8 September 2016

SOURCE

The recent criticism of the Swazi government from many Swazis is misplaced. They should be blaming the country’s absolute monarch, who recently assumed the chairmanship of SADC, says exiled political activist Sonkhe Dube, writes Kenworthy News Media.

How can there be democracy in Swaziland, when parliament treats the country’s absolute monarch King Mswati III as a god and when the whole cabinet and several member of parliament are elected by the King? And why do Swazis blame parliament for the country’s ills, when Mswati clearly has the last say on everything?

These are questions that Sonkhe Dube, the International Secretary of the banned Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO), says he keeps asking himself about his native Swaziland, a country where two thirds of the population languishes in poverty and where political parties are in effect banned and their members harassed.

And a country that Sonkhe fled for fear of being arrested and tortured by the police, as he has been on several occasions because of his fight for democracy and social justice.

Blaming powerless parliament is misguided
“The Swazi population came out guns blazing against the government at the Sibaya Forum [a People’s Parliament where Swaziland’s absolute monarch summons his subjects to the royal cattle byre to discuss pressing issues]. But the repeated calls for the axing of the Prime Minister and his government were misplaced. Parliament in reality have to serve the hand that appointed them before they serve the people, so removing the government is like cutting tree branches and hoping that the tree will be uprooted,” says Sonkhe Dube.

He believes that his fellow Swazis fear the monarch too much to dare criticize him in public. According to international NGO’s such as Freedom House and Amnesty International these fears are certainly not unfounded.

According to Freedom House, who speak of Swaziland as a country where “elected members of parliament have no oversight or influence over setting government policy, making laws, or adjusting spending levels,” the population of Swaziland is one of the populations in the world with least political freedom. Amnesty International describes how “repressive legislation” and “politically motivated trials and laws that violate the principle of legality … continues to be used to suppress dissent.”

Tell the King the truth
But Sonkhe Dube nevertheless believes that Swazis must confront the true root cause of their woes if they are to transform Swaziland from an absolute monarchy that benefits few to a democracy. After all, over half the Swazi population highly disapproves of the current form of government and less than a fifth believe their country to be fully democratic according to opinion polls from Afrobarometer.

“The king should be told the honest truth about the chaos caused by his absolute power without fear or favour. A person with a rash caused by a certain blood disease cannot stop the rash with an ointment, without taking care of the disease in the blood.”

Sonkhe Dube is a teacher by profession. He is the International Secretary of the Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO), and is currently living in exile in neighbouring South Africa due to his pro-democracy activism and affiliation to SWAYOCO. He has been arrested, detained and tortured on several occasions by King Mswati’s police. He cannot go back to Swaziland, he says, because he fears the response of the brutal Swazi police.

ROYAL GREED SOLD AS SWAZI CULTURE

Royal greed and oppression sold as culture in Swaziland

Kenworthy News Media, 3 August 2016 

SOURCE

Swaziland’s king Mswati III passes suppression, unaccountability and royal opulent spending in the face of drought, starvation and poverty, as traditionally “Swazi” values.  Sonkhe Dube, a young exiled activist, begs to differ, writes Kenworthy News Media.

“The Swazi system of governance, ‘Tinkhundla’, is indeed unique”, says, Sonkhe Dube, who is the International Secretary of the Swaziland Youth Congress. “They claim it is a democratic institution that encompasses traditional form of leadership. But in a democratic state, the cabinet is not handpicked by a king who literally controls everything without being accountable to his citizens”.

King Mswati III has recently spent US$ 14 million on a new personal 375-seater jet and will be spending millions of dollars more on hosting a SADC Heads of State summit this year, while a quarter of his population is starving. According to the World Bank, Swaziland is a lower middle income-country.

Swazi law and custom
In Africa, many colonial authorities and traditional leaders together recreated the relatively pluralistic and consensus-driven traditional chiefdoms into a source of royal power that could be controlled by indirect rule.

In Swaziland, king Mswati’s father king Sobhuza II was given the power to appoint and dismiss chiefs and in 1957, 11 years before independence, acts of disobedience against the king was made illegal by a colonial act. The foundations that were laid for such royal hegemony were seen a couple of years after independence, in 1973, when Sobhuza II banned political parties, declared a state of emergency that is yet to be officially repealed and began ruling as an absolute monarch.

Tradition is also the basis for Swaziland’s constitution (from 2005), where the words “…in accordance with Swazi law and custom” are used many times. The constitution also gives the king executive authority in Swaziland and in effect lets him determine what constitutes “Swazi law and custom”.

Cultural oppression
Nevertheless, Swazis are made to believe that the monarchy rules through the people by way of a traditional people’s parliament, ‘Sibaya’, say Sonkhe Dube.

“But when the king called Sibaya in 2012, and the convention pronounced to the king that they wanted the Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini and his cabinet out, the king responded by keeping them. The same Prime Minister is still in charge, against the will of the people”.

Ordinary Swazis are also at the mercy of the king through his chiefs in their everyday lives. One example of this was in September 2014 in Nokwane, where the houses of many poor Swazi families were bulldozed to the ground without a warrant and with only 48 hours’ notice, to make way for a Science Park. Many of them had lived there for decades and had nowhere else to go.

“Chiefs allocate land to people and chase them out of their chiefdoms if they feel there is something wrong with them, as happened in Kamkhweli and Macetjeni, where the king sanctioned the eviction of families. The king and the chiefs also order their subjects to do voluntary manual labour in their fields. The product from the manual labour culturally has to cater for the vulnerable and orphaned, but currently it is not doing that, yet people are still required to provide labour for the chiefs and the monarchy. Culturally, the king and chiefs do not own the land but are supposed to be holding it in trust for the people”, Sonkhe Dube says.

Greedy monarchy
No culture remains frozen in time. Culture is, or ought to be, about the adjustment of society to the needs of its citizens, as well as the other way round.

And according to Sonkhe Dube, the current Swazi Tinkhundla system of governance is by no means adjusting itself to the needs and wishes of the people. It is neither democratic nor even truly traditional in a Swazi sense.

“It is a system based on the manipulation of culture to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the greedy monarchy. The monarchy should stop hiding behind culture. Swazi culture in not only about ceremonies but also about social responsibilities which the present powers that be are intentionally ignoring”, says Sonkhe Dube.

Sonkhe Dube is a teacher by profession. He is the International Secretary of the Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO), and is currently living in exile in neighbouring South Africa due to his pro-democracy activism and affiliation to SWAYOCO. He has been arrested, detained and tortured on several occasions by King Mswati’s police. He cannot go back to Swaziland, he says, because he fears the response of the brutal Swazi police.

ACTIVIST LEADER MAXWELL IN COURT

Maxwell Dlamini, the Secretary General of the Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO), appeared at Mbabane magistrates court today (24 April 2013) and was remanded in custody until 2 May.

Dlamini is accused of participating in an ‘unlawful activity’, but, it is thought he might later be charged with sedition. 

SWAYOCO, is a banned organisation in Swaziland. SWAYOCO was prevented by police from holding a public election rally at Msunduza Township, Mbabane, on 19 April, the day of King Mswati III’s 45th birthday. 

Dlamini was arrested following the rally, along with Sonkhe Dube the international secretary of SWAYOCO. Dube was held by police for 17 hours and then released. 

Dlamini has officially been charged with a crime of organising and participation in an illegal activity on 19 April in Mbabane, according to the Swaziland United Democratic Front.

When Dlamini was arrested on a previous occasion he reported that he was tortured by Swazi police. 

This was when he put on trial for possession of explosives, a case that has been postponed several times. Dlamini is out on bail for that charge. 

SWAYOCO reported that the arrest of the two SWAYOCO leaders followed the police clamp down on the rally that was part of the organisation’s campaign for an election boycott.

There have also been several recent arrests of other activists in Swaziland, including Wonder Mkhonza, Mfanawnkosi ‘Boer’ Mntshaliand and Derrick Nkambule, the latter two who were allegedly tortured.

See also

POLICE BREAK UP ELECTION MEETING

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2013/04/police-break-up-election-meeting.html

POLICE TORTURE STUDENT LEADER

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2012/03/police-torture-student-leader.html

FOUR YOUTH LEADERS RE-ARRESTED

Police have rearrested the four youth leaders who were initially detained at a roadblock on Sunday and kept for two days. Together with them is the President of the Swaziland National Association of Civil Servants, Quinton Dlamini, the Swaziland Solidarity Network reports.

The four youth leaders are:

1. Maxwell Dlamini: The President of the Swaziland National Union Of Students.

2. Themba Mabuza: An organiser for the Swaziland United Democratic Front.

3. Sonkhe Dube: Executive member of SWAYOCO

4. Sifiso Mabuza: SWAYOCO member

Information on the ground is that the protests are continuing with renewed fervour. The action has now shifted from Manzini to Mbabane, the capital.