Some of King Mswati III’s 13 wives and 100 or so of their closest friends set off on a vacation to Japan and Australia costing an estimated US$10 million this month (July 2013). Meanwhile, back in Swaziland reports on how poverty is crippling not only people’s bodies but also the kingdom’s economy were published across the world.
It was reported this month that Swazi diplomats lived the high life in New York. They stayed at the best hotels and shopped til they dropped, while attending the United Nations.
The bogus national election is drawing nearer amid allegations that voting registration was fixed to grossly exaggerate the number of people signed up to vote.
MPs say their phones have been bugged and their workshops infiltrated by state police.
Political instability is hitting the economy and government policies have been blamed for the high levels of hunger in the kingdom.
So, it was just another typical month in Swaziland. Swaziland: Striving for Freedom, Volume 7: July 2013 is the latest monthly digest of reports that first appeared on the Swazi media Commentary website in July 2013. It is available free of charge at www.scribd.com
Swazi Media Commentary has no physical base and is completely independent of any political faction and receives no income from any individual or organisation. People who contribute ideas or write for it do so as volunteers and receive no payment.
Swazi Media Commentary was on hiatus for most of the month of July, but is now back at work and will continue to be published online – updated most days – bringing information, comment and analysis
Swaziland: Striving For Freedom, Vol 3. March 2013
In this edition of Swaziland: Striving For Freedom, Swazi Media Commentary reveals that spending on defence equipment in Swaziland is set to rise by 50 times in the coming year. This was part of ‘defence’ spending that will take up 10 percent of the entire budget for the kingdom. Nobody at the Swazi Government would go on record to explain why this was needed, except to say the spending was necessary for ‘security’ and to ‘keep the peace’.
The vast spending on defence reminded Swaziland watchers that the kingdom, ruled by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, had in the recent past tried to buy arms worth millions of US from the United Kingdom, but that country’s government blocked the move, believing the weapons might be turned on the king’s subjects should they continue their protests for democracy.
Elsewhere this month, the government has been found out selling maize, donated by Japan as humanitarian food aid, on the open market. The money has been stashed in a special account at the Central Bank of Swaziland. The Swazi Government claims this action is legal, but Japan has made no public statement. We haven’t heard the last of this yet.
Elections are coming in Swaziland this year and King Mswati’s subjects are waiting for him to tell them when it will be. Only then, can electioneering begin. A campaign to boycott the election because political parties are banned from taking part is gathering momentum. This month a European Union delegation visited the kingdom and also told the king the ban on political parties should be lifted.
Police and state security forces broke up another prayer meeting (the second time in two months): this one was to mark the anniversary of the formation of the national labour federation, TUCOSWA. King Mswati’s courts banned TUCOSWA after it declared itself to be against the forthcoming election.
Swaziland: Striving For Freedom, which is available to download free-of-chargeat scribd dot com. is the third volume of information, commentary and analysis on human rights taken from articles first published on the Swazi Media Commentary blogsite in March 2013. Each month throughout this year a digest of articles will be published bringing together in one place material that is rarely found elsewhere.
Swazi Media Commentary has no physical base and is completely independent of any political faction and receives no income from any individual or organisation. People who contribute ideas or write for it do so as volunteers and receive no payment.
Swaziland’s King Mswati III is the 15th richest royal in the world, with more money than his counterparts in Spain or Japan.
Even though 70 per cent of Swazis earn less than one US dollar a day, King Mswati is said to have a net worth of 200 million dollars.
The most recent estimate from Forbes Magazine in the United States reveals that as some royals get ‘poorer’, King Mswati just keeps coining it in.
So if the rest of Swaziland is so poor, where does King Mswati, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, get his money from? This is a carefully guarded secret but according to Afrik.com he owns (among other things) 10 per cent of every mining company in Swaziland.
The website also reminds us that the king has a ‘penchant for luxury’ and is reckoned to have 14 wives (no one is really sure about the number he has since this is information the Swazi people are not allowed to have) each with a personal palace.
Forbessays King Mswati is the beneficiary of two funds created by his father Sobhuza IIin trust for the Swazi nation. During his reign, he has absolute discretion over use of the income, which has allowed him to build palaces for each of his wives and stay at five-star hotels when abroad.
We also know that the people of Swaziland have to pay for the king’s extravagances. Last year they were forced to spend about something like 10 million dollars on a party to ‘celebrate’ the king’s 40th birthday and the 40th anniversary of the kingdom’s independence.
As well as his personal wealth, King Mswati receives money from the Swazi taxpayer. In this year’s Swaziland national budgethe gets E130 million (about 13 million US dollars) for his family’s upkeep.
This is more than the money Swaziland will spend on capital expenditure for education (E113 million) or capital expenditure on social security and welfare (E73 million).
Or put another way, 70 percent of the families of one million Swazi people live on less than E10 a day, while the Royal Family gets by on a third of a million a day.
The Princess, aged 21, who is allegedly studying at the Biola University in Los Angeles, California, USA, spends most of her time trying to forge a career as a rap star under the name Princess Pashu.
Now, to add to the various online networks she already has, an ‘official’ website has been opened up. This one plays down her musical ambitions and highlights her life as a member of the Swazi Royal Family.
And what a family. According to the website, King Mswati has 23 children in total, the princess has over 200 aunts and uncles, not including their own spouses as the late King Sobhuza II had 102 wives and over 400 children. That’s a lot of mouths for the Swazi people to feed.
The website says that King Mswati has 12 wives, but most observers think he has at least 13. Nobody can be sure because the number of wives the king has is information that the Swazi people are not allowed to know.
The website is meant to show just how much the princess loves Swaziland and all the hard work she puts in for her people. The effect is somewhat undermined on the page devoted to her forthcoming planned events. The most recent - presenting books to students at Lasi High School – was scheduled for 24 July 2008. So she’s not entirely rushed off her feet then.
One of the most striking features of the website is its gaudy attempt to glamorise the Princess through the use of doctored photographs. She is described as a ‘model’ who ‘maintains a respectable yet flexible range of poses’.
I don’t know who set up the website, but it states that she owns the copyright to all the material on it (even though much of it, such as reports from Swazi newspapers about her, was not written by her).
There have been suspicions for some time that she has a public relations firm working for her (her father has at least two working for him), so maybe this is part of an image building exercise. Let’s face it she needs to work hard to dispel the belief that she parties while Swazis starve.
King Mswati III’s instruction to graduates at the University of Swaziland (UNISWA) to look outside the kingdom for jobs because there are none at home has sparked outrage.
The King, who is Chancellor of the University of Swaziland, said that graduates from previous years had been unable to find jobs and there was no reason to expect this situation to change anytime soon.
The King who did not attend the UNISWA graduation last weekend (4 October 2008) in person had his speech read by his brother Prince Masitsela.
The King said he believed that UNISWA graduates would be able to get jobs anywhere in the world.
Of course, anyone who knows the job landscape knows this is not true. A qualification from UNISWA is in fact not recognised in most countries, including some in the southern Africa region.
The king’s comments caused outrage when they were published on the Times of Swaziland website. Many readers left comments that blamed the king personally for the situation. They said he was leader of the kingdom and had to take the blame for the poor economic performance of Swaziland. One reader even went so far as to call on King Mswati to abdicate (but I notice that this comment was swiftly deleted from the website).
The Times in an editorial comment (6 October 2008) described the graduate unemployment as ‘lack of confidence in the country’s ability to fulfil its obligations’. The Times said that the King had no choice but to tell graduates to go outside Swaziland for jobs and called on the new government to resolve the problem, although in characteristic fashion, it didn’t say how this could be done.
Vusi Sibisi in his As I See It column in the Times (8 October 2008) blamed failed politics in Swaziland for the problem and a failure to attract foreign investors to the kingdom. Those that have come to Swaziland such as the Taiwan textile owners are ‘slave drivers’, he said.
Times editor Martin Dlamini returned to the King’s speech in his own Just Thinking column yesterday (10 October 2008).
Dlamini said, ‘That he [the King] has publicly acknowledged it has to be commended. No politician in the world would dare acknowledge such failure as he/she would not last another day in office.’
Well of course, King Mswati doesn’t have to worry about that since nobody elected him and there is no way legally to get rid of him. He is the last autonomous monarch in sub-Saharan Africa. He also has a wealth of 200 million US dollars (about E1.6 million) and sends his own children to universities and schools overseas so he has no personal stake in the problem.
Dlamini believes, ‘The reason this country has no jobs can be attributed to dozens of factors, but it starts with the failure to have the right people in the right positions and the failure to provide them with a conducive environment to do the right thing.’
He is right that the blame for the failure of the Swazi economy must be laid squarely at the ruling elite.
As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported on Swaziland in July 2008. ‘When the rest of sub-Saharan Africa was growing over the last decade, the economy of the Kingdom of Swaziland stagnated.’
The IMF added, ‘Swaziland's real per capita GDP [Gross Domestic Product] growth declined from an annual rate of 2 ½ percent during 1980-94 to 0.7 percent since then. In contrast, real growth in all of sub-Saharan Africa has averaged 1 ½ percent annually since 1995 and in other lower-middle-income countries, growth averaged 7 ½ percent.'
You can’t blame Swaziland’s economic woes on some world downturn. While the neighbours were doing well, Swaziland was stagnating. The blame clearly is with the government, the Prime Minister and King Mswati III who appointed them.
The news of the King’s speech made the international media on Thursday (9 October 2008). The IRIN news agency reported, ‘The 1,500 graduates leaving Swaziland’s only university this week face little prospect of non-governmental employment worthy of their degrees. Since the 1990s, foreign direct investment has been aimed at the manufacturing sector, which uses low-wage labour, typically women, who are paid so poorly they often depend on money lenders to get through the month.’
IRIN went on the say, ‘[Some] commentators have gone as far as suggesting a government-encouraged brain drain has a political benefit by ridding the country of middle-class technocrats that historically have been the driving force behind democratic reform.’
