The recent uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya have fascinated many within the pro-democracy groups in Swaziland. By the same token, the ruling regime has been rattled. In an undemocratic country like Swaziland, people have good reason to monitor what is happening in the north and to – a large extent – even aspire to have the same courage and motivation as the revolutionaries. Given the mainstream media’s failure to adequately cover these events, Swazi citizens are turning to Facebook to find out the news – and plan their own uprising, Manqoba Nxumalo writes in the latest edition of Free African Media.
Mainstream media in Swaziland has not paid much attention to the uprisings in the north, let alone pointed out the lessons to be learnt, not just by the present regime in the country, but also similar by dictators all over the continent. In fact, it has been conspicuously silent on updating the Swazi nation on what is happening in north Africa.
Nxumalo explores the rise of social media in Swaziland and its influence in galvanising people in Swaziland.
‘Change is becoming increasingly urgent in Swaziland, an authoritarian absolute monarchy where the economy is in danger of spiralling out of control. But as recent events in Tunisia and Egypt have shown, change can happen quickly’, PETER KENWORTHY interviews Swaziland United Democratic Front Project Coordinator Sikelela Dlamini, for his stiffkitten blog.
I wrote last weekabout the striking similarity between conditions in Swaziland and in Tunisia where people took to the streets to overthrow a dictator.
Then protests moved onto Egypt. Here, ordinary people, especially the youth, bypassed the established opposition parties and took to the streets on their own account – utilising social networking to publicise their cause.
There are lessons there for Swaziland.
As with Tunisia, there are uncanny similarities between the social, economic and political situation in Egypt, prior to the uprising and the experience of Swaziland.
This was brought home to me by an editorial comment in the Observer, a Sunday newspaper in the UK, yesterday (30 January 2011). The newspaper was writing about Egypt, but it could easily have been (and might yet be) writing about Swaziland.
Here is part of what the Observer wrote. I have changed the names ‘Egypt’ to read ‘Swaziland’ and president ‘Hosni Mubarak’ to read ‘King Mswati III’. See what I mean?
Days of rage in [Swaziland] signify the end of days for [King Mswati’s] repressive and bankrupt regime. For [25] years, the [king] has held his country down through fear, secret police, emergency laws, American cash subsidies and a lamentable absence of vision and imagination. His crude, Gaullist message: without me, chaos. Now the chaos has come anyway. And [Mswati] must go.
Five days of rage on the streets of [Swaziland] have transformed the way [Swaziland] sees itself. For years, they said it was impossible. The regime was too powerful, the masses too apathetic, the security apparatus too ubiquitous. Like eastern Europeans trapped in the Soviet Union's cold, pre-1991 embrace, they struggled in the dark, without help, without hope. Movements for change, such as [PUDEMO], were brutally suppressed. Courageous dissidents such as [Mario Masuku] were harassed, beaten and imprisoned.
Yet all the time, pressure for reform was rising. Every day, higher prices, economic stagnation, poverty and unemployment, political stasis, official corruption and a stifled, censored public space became less and less tolerable. Every day, impatience with the regime's insulting insouciance bred more enemies. Hatred seeped like poison through the veins of the people. Until, at last, in five days of rage, as if as one, they cried: ‘Enough!’ And now, [Mswati] must go.
Fittingly, [Swaziland’s] youth led the way against the old order, using not guns or bombs but the arsenal of 21st-century information technology: social media, mobiles, texts and emails. The Paris mob of Bastille notoriety became, through peaceful evolution, the flash mob of Tahrir Square. They espoused no leaders. They wrote no plans. In fast-moving, separate but interconnected street offensives, they out-thought, outfoxed and outran the police.
With the once omnipotent security forces looking beatable, [Swazis] of all backgrounds rose to join the fight: students, trade unionists, women, rights activists, Islamists and, crucially, the great workers’ army of [Swaziland’s] employed and unemployed. Here, truly, was people power in all its magnificent might. Here was democracy in the raw. Here was the legitimacy of a [Swaziland] freed of its old fears and suddenly alive to its changing destiny. In five days of rage, they seized control of their country’s future. And so, inevitably, [Mswati] must go.
King Mswati III,Swaziland’s king and the last absolute monarch in sub-Saharan Africa, must be jumping at shadows after the recent events in Tunisia that saw the overthrow of its dictator, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
It happened in the blink of an eye and showed that even a fairly small event could spark a national uprising that a carefully constructed state apparatus was powerless to stop. Within a month of the start of protests, Ben Ali had to flee the country into exile.
There are two lessons for the Swaziland pro-democracy movement from this: (i) dictatorships can be overthrown; (ii) social networking – that is Internet sites such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube – were important tools in mobilizing action and opinion against the dictatorship.
The first lesson (and most worrying for the Swazi regime) is simple: people can overthrow tyrannical governments. In Tunisia’s case the protests were sparked when a 26-year-old impoverished college graduate set fire to himself in front of a government building to protest that the authorities had confiscated his only way of making a living: an illegal vegetable vending cart.
Demonstrations spread throughout the country. Ordinary Tunisians who were fed up with unemployment and corruption took to the streets and were later joined by labour unions, lawyers, students, professionals and youths.
Tunisia, according to Amnesty International, under Ben Ali had one of the Arab world’s most repressive governments.
The similarities between Tunisia and Swaziland are uncanny, with both ruled by dictators who came to power in a bloodless coup. Tunisia’s Ben Ali, began his presidency in 1987, while Swaziland’s King Mswati came to power in 1986 on the back of the 1973 Royal Proclamation delivered by his father Sobhuza II. The proclamation banned political parties and created a state of emergency that (despite a new constitution) for all practical purposes exists today, making King Mswati an absolute monarch.
Both Tunisia and Swaziland have a large over-educated, under-employed, population, many of them young people. Public dissent in both nations was almost unheard of, with free speech and free assembly routinely quashed by state forces. Many protests are met with violence by police and a top priority of government is to disrupt anyone or any group seen as opponents to the regime.Because of the lack of Western journalists in Tunisia or Swaziland, hardly anything about this gets into the international media.
Tunisia and Swaziland have many of the same social, economic and political problems, including a high rate of youth unemployment (with graduates very often unable to get anything but menial work); a general lack of economic opportunity; elections viewed as a political farce; the state’s credibility lost; members of the government more concerned with their own welfare and operating a jobs-for-the-boys policy when government jobs are allocated; widespread corruption (but, often unacknowledged); and unemployment becomes a medium of expression on the streets for want of another means of expression.
President Ben Ali blamed ‘foreign elements’ for stirring up trouble. In Swaziland, the blame goes to people who are ‘un-Swazi’. Barnabas Dlamini, Swaziland’s illegally-appointed Prime Minister, wants foreigners who speak out against his government tortured.
On a more personal level, Ben Ali's daughter, Nesrine, aged 23, was perceived as ‘friendly and interested, but naive and clueless’. She reflected the very sheltered, privileged and wealthy life she has led.’ (Shades here of King Mswati’s eldest daughter, the rapper, Princess ‘Pashu’ Sikhanyiso).
There was anger in Tunisia that President Ben Ali and his family lived in opulent style. US Ambassador Robert Godec, in a cable published by Wikileaks said, ‘The opulence with which El Materi [Ben Ali’s son-in-law] and Nesrine [Ben Ali’s daughter] live and their behavior make clear why they and other members of Ben Ali's family are disliked and even hated by some Tunisians. The excesses of the Ben Ali family are growing.’
In Swaziland, the excesses of King Mswati and his family are well documented in international circles, but mostly unmentioned in the Swazi media.
The second major lesson to be learned from the Tunisian experience is that ordinary people can use ‘social networking’ as a way of organising protest and letting the world know of their grievances.
In Tunisia, as in Swaziland, state-controlled television and radio is a propaganda tool of the government. Tunisian state television reported that the protests were ‘isolated events.’ This lie was completely shattered when Al Jazeera satellite television aired Facebook and YouTube videos, as well as Flickr images, showing that the demonstrations were anything but isolated. Al Jazeera and other Arab television networks broadcast social media videos because non-state media were banned from reporting from Tunisia.
Tunisians used videos, pictures and words to show the world what is going on in their country. And by putting those messages online, they spurred individuals and media organizations around the world to take a closer look at their cause.
CNN journalist Tim Lister told CTV's Canada AM that Twitter and Facebook were ‘the real motors’ of the protest movement. ‘The scale of the protests became very quickly noticeable to the outside world on Flickr, on Twitter, on Facebook and that attracted the attention of some of the Arabic news networks…and they began to cover this.’
During the protests, Tunisians constantly uploaded videos and up-to-the-minute Twitter feeds of street demonstrations. Some of the images of police brutality were gruesome, which probably served to outrage international opinion even further.
And at least one Tunisian revolutionary, who runs a websitecalled Free Tunisia, told a Huffington Post blogger that social media such as Twitter — along with cellphones, text messaging and various websites — was crucial to the flow of information and helped protesters gather and plan their demonstrations.
Turning to Swaziland, protests are brutally repressed by state forces,but people continue to demonstrate. The economy is in collapse and even the Prime Minister has warned of social unrest.
With social networking, it is impossible to calculate exactly how many people in Swaziland use Facebook, Twitter and the other Internet sites, but the number is growing by the day, most obviously among young, educated people, living in urban areas. Many Swazi people online only use the Internet for social chit-chat, but there is also a sizeable pro-democracy community online. Even now, while Swaziland remains relatively peaceful, these sites are valuable at getting information about human rights and civil liberties abuses out into the wider world.
We know that social networking worries the Swazi Government, because it blocked the website of the People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO) and is making plans to expand its propaganda operations outside of the kingdom.
Social networking will be important in the Swazi uprising, but one thing must be clear: it was the Tunisian people who toppled Ben Ali, and social networking helped. In that order.
So, in a nutshell: any small event can spark off the uprising and the ordinary people of Swaziland can get support for their cause from social networking.
Social networking is in place. All we need now is the spark.
