KING’S EMPTY BOASTS ON PROSPERITY

King Mswati is at it again, offering empty boasts that he has attracted foreign business people to invest in his kingdom on a large scale, with thousands of jobs on offer for his impoverished subjects.

The king, who is becoming a serial fantasist, returned to his kingdom this week from a trip to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Taiwan claiming that he hadsecured Taiwanese investment to build a pharmaceutical plant, a food processing plant, a bottled water plant, a cosmetics plant and a granite and marble venture – which, according to a report in the Times of Swaziland newspaper, were expected to create more than 3 000 jobs.

The Times also reported that the king had secured investment of E100 million to pay for the project. That figure should have rang alarm bells with the media in Swaziland because E100 million is about  US$10 million -- and you’d need to get a lot of bang for your bucks to build the five projects the king spoke about on that money.

It seems every time the king goes on a trip to the Middle East or Taiwan he comes back with tall tales of his achievements with businesspeople. The Swazi media, who surely would tell readers that he was wearing a fine set of clothes even when he was clearly buck-naked, faithfully report what he says.

But, it takes no more than five minutes searching through the news archives to demonstrate that King Mswati simply tells lies.

Here are some of the projects the king has promised in the past that have not materialised.

In October  2009, he came back from Qatar claiming he had secured US$4.8 billion  to develop a ‘world-class’ facility that would store at least a three-month supply of fuel for Swaziland. Nothing happened. 

In the same month he said there was about US$200 million available for a facelift for the Swazi capital city Mbabane. It would have a ‘fully fledged state-of-the-art 21st Century Civic Centre befitting a country’s capital city’. It would have the tallest building in the capital which would be able to host a number of activities such as national games, business meetings, music and arts festivals. Building was due to start in 2010 and take three years. Nothing happened.

For years the king has been banging on about the Sikhuphe international airport, but it is still under construction in the Swaziland wilderness. This was supposed to open in 2010 with major airlines fighting to land their planes. It has not opened. In October 2009, the king announced ‘one of the world’s leading airlines’, the UAE-based Etihad Airways, would use the airport. No deal yet.

And, then there was ‘Swazi City’ with its 250 shops with four floors of luxurious shopping experience; Royal Villas which would offer up to six-star accommodation facilities suitable for all type of guests; a 28-floor hotel with 350 guest suites, world-class restaurants, three swimming areas and in-door sporting facilities, a health spa and a casino.

The king announced this plan in April 2009. He said the multi-million emalangeni cost (nobody seemed able to give a definite price) would be met by international finance. He said it would be completed in three years and bring 15,000 new jobs. It wasn’t and it didn’t.

In February 2010, King Mswati received a standing ovation at the opening of parliament when he announced that his government would spend about US$150 million over the next three years on houses for the nation.  It didn’t happen.

The king’s fantasies date back at least 15 years when he was supposed to have teamed up with another fantasist, the pop singer Michael Jackson, to bring a ‘Netherland-style’ theme park to Swaziland. Media reports in 1998 said King Mswati personally met with Jackson at Disneyland in the US to get him on board. No Netherland has been built.

It surely speaks volumes about how much people in Swaziland fear the king, who is sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, and who has a state-apparatus ready at his disposal to crush any dissent, however mild and no matter how justified, that no one will stand up and say, King Mswati has no clothes.

See also

FANTASY WATCH: ECONOMIC REALITY

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2009/11/fantasy-watch-economic-reality.html

SWAZILAND’S CAPITAL CITY FANTASY

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2009/10/swazilands-capital-city-fantasy.html

SWAZILAND’S JOBS FANTASY

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2009/04/swazilands-jobs-fantasy.html

FLAW IN SWAZI KING’S VANITY PROJECT

I’m pleased to see that there is at least one voice of sanity surrounding the latest of King Mswati III’s vanity project.

The king, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, is pressing for a ‘Royal Science and Technology Park’ to be built in the kingdom. As I reported on Monday (22 November 2010) this will cost E850 million (120 million US dollars), but no one can explain why it is needed and who will use it.

Project manager Moses Zungu has been talking it up (as you’d expect) and he says that world class researchers will want to come to work at the site.

He even said that the kingdom’s only university, the University of Swaziland (UNISWA), would play a key role in providing expertise at the park.

But this expertise has been exaggerated. And who says so? Academics at the university itself.

When the plan for the science park was unveiled at a meeting at the university, staff very nearly laughed out loud at the suggestion that UNISWA (Chancellor: King Mswati himself) was anywhere close to being a global ‘centre of excellence’.

At the meeting one unnamed academic (when I say ‘unnamed’ I don’t mean he has no name, but that it is an unwise career move to be publicly speaking out against the university, so he/she must remain anonymous) said the government shouldn’t worry about financing a science park it should ‘fund fully the university’s budget’.

For years now UNISWA has been bumping along the bottom with poor facilities. It is a common sight to see students carrying chairs from one classroom to another because there is not enough furniture at the university for them to use during classes.

The anonymous lecturer told Zungu that a project of the magnitude of the science park ‘needs specially educated people with advanced qualifications whom this university cannot produce’.

At present the university doesn’t offer PhD or other doctoral courses (even though it ‘awarded’ an honorary doctorate to Barnabas Dlamini, Swaziland’s illegally-appointed Prime Minister). Most of the teaching staff at UNISWA don’t themselves have PhD qualifications and some don’t even have graduate (masters) degrees.

The lack of expertise in Swaziland didn’t worry Zungu. He said expatriates will be brought into Swaziland to get the science park up and running and then Swazi locals will come in as they got properly qualified.

What he didn’t explain was why top quality researchers from across the globe would want to work in Swaziland, a kingdom ruled by King Mswati, and where all dissent is fiercely suppressed and there is no freedom of speech.

This is not an environment where intellectual inquiry thrives.

NEW VANITY PROJECT FOR SWAZI KING

In the same week we hear that the Swaziland Government wants to throw another E350 million (50 million US dollars) of taxpayers’ money at the Sikhuphe International Airport comes news that construction of the ‘Royal Science and Technology Park’ will begin in April 2011- with the first phase costing E850 million.

And what do the airport and the science park have in common? They are both Royal vanity projects that the kingdom, ruled by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, doesn’t need and can’t afford.

The Minister of Information Communication and Technology Nelsiwe Shongwe said the project would consist of a bio-technological park and an information technology park at Nokwane.

According to a report in the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati, Moses Zungu, the Project Manager, said the science park was the initiative of the king.

That tells us everything. Sikhuphe Airport, which presently is unfinished because government money ran out, was also a vanity project (sorry, ‘initiative’) of King Mswati. He’s not an absolute monarch for nothing: if he wants a project, he gets a project. Or at least a project gets started.

Zungu told professors and lecturers at the University of Swaziland (Chancellor: King Mswati) that the science park ‘was a process whose fruits would take time to be witnessed’.

Or put another way: we don’t know who wants to use the science park, or where the money is going to come from to build it, but we’re going ahead with it anyway.

Zungu said an investment of E850 million would be spent on the first phase, which would involve basic infrastructure such as roads, drainage, landscaping and other works, while architectural designs for the project were being processed. That phase starts in April 2011.

It looks like this is another round of my Fantasy Watch game. Write that date down and let’s come back in April and see how Mr Zungu is getting on.

SWAZI GOVERNMENT JOBS FANTASY

Think of a number that sounds impressive and let’s call that the number of new jobs that can be created in the private sector in the Swaziland economy before 2015.

That seems to be the approach of the Swazi Government, if the latest information trickling out about its recent visit to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is anything to go by.

The Government in its grandly titled ‘Fiscal Adjustment Roadmap (FAR)’ says there will be between 25,000 – 30,000 new jobs created in the private sector (to put this in context, there are about 35,000 employed by government at present). It looks to me like this is another round of my Fantasy Watch game.

Why is it a fantasy? Because new information, recently released by the World Bank shows that Swaziland is ranked 115 out of 183 countries in the world in an ‘Ease of Doing Business’ survey. And it has slipped down one place since last year.

The 115 position is an overall ranking but Swaziland does even worse in individual categories.

The report called Doing Business 2010 Swaziland ranks Swaziland 180 out of 183 countries for ‘protecting investors’. A major concern here is that public assets are used for private gain (that’s called ‘corruption’ in plain English).

Swaziland is at 158 in three categories: ‘starting a business’, ‘registering property’ and ‘trading across borders’. It is at 130 for ‘enforcing contracts’.

The reports states it requires 13 procedures and takes 61 days to start a business in Swaziland. If, for example, you want to build warehouses, that requires 13 procedures and takes 93 days.

So just who are the businesses that are going to set up and create the jobs?

The Swaziland Government in its submission to the IMF blames the ‘realignment’ of global and regional economies for the financial mess it has made of the kingdom.

But it also recognises that it needs to reform and ‘improve the investment climate and business environment by removing as many binding constraints as possible’.

And those ‘reforms’ will bring 30,000 new jobs by 2015? We’ve written that in our diaries guys and we’ll be watching to make sure you make good on your promise.

GVT BILL UNPAID: WORKERS LAID OFF

About 300 workers at the Sikhuphe International Airport building site have been laid off because the Swaziland Government hasn’t paid its bills.

The Swazi Government is said to owe the contractors E200 million (29 million US dollars). There is no plan to reemploy the laid-off workers and they have been sent home.

Sikhuphe has been mired in controversy because it is an expensive waste of time. Latest estimates are that if it ever gets finished it will have cost at least 1 billion US dollars (roughly 1,000 dollars per man, woman and child in Swaziland, where seven in ten people are so poor they earn less than one US dollar a day).

As I have pointed out many times before in my Fantasy Watch game, Sikhuphe is a vanity project for King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

There was never a feasibility study to see whether Swaziland needed a new airport and when the plan was first aired in 2003 the International Monetary Fund branded it a waste of money.

This is ironic because in the same week that the layoffs at Sikhuphe have been made, Barnabas Dlamini, Swaziland’s illegally-appointed Prime Minister and colleagues have been in Washington to try to get the IMF to support a loan application so government can pay salaries to its workers this month (October 2010).

So far the IMF has not given Swaziland any budget support and news of the Sikhuphe layoffs should remind it of how the Swazi government squanders money.

The Times of Swaziland, the kingdom’s only independent daily newspaper, reported today (8 October 2010) that contractors were still having talks with the government to try to get the money paid.

Bertram Stewart, Principal Secretary, Ministry of Economic Planning, told the newspaper the government was still processing all the invoice documentation concerning the payment and would pay the contractor.

‘The government system is not fast and everyone knows that,’ he said.

Stewart also said the airport, ‘would be opened at the end of the calendar year’. By my calculation that’s in 12 weeks time. Put the date in your diary and get ready for the next round of excuses as to why the airport remains unfinished.