Swazi Media Commentary

Sunday, 9 December 2012

‘TIMES’ SAYS BATTERED WOMEN TO BLAME

The Times Sunday newspaper in Swaziland is at the centre of another row after its columnist Qalakaliboli Dlamini wrote that battered women in the kingdom were to blame when men were violent against them.

He also said that the serial killer David Simelane, recently sentenced to hang for the murder of 32 women, might have been driven to the crimes because he was once falsely accused of rape by a woman.

Dlamini, who earlier this year was suspended from writing his column for the newspaper after readers were outraged by homophobic comments he wrote, was criticising the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence campaign.

He wrote that ‘most’ women who were victims of violence brought it upon themselves. He also said women were to blame for turning men violent.

He wrote, ‘In fact, when a woman is battered, she may have caused more internal damage to the male who will have caused her external harm. Let us be honest with each other, women are the biggest abusers in the world.’

He said women were ‘culprits’ not ‘victims’. He said, ‘Women have carved themselves as the victims of this world and they are demanding even more than they deserve.’

He added, ‘Women find comfort in portraying themselves as victims.’

In a confused piece of writing, he also seemed to say that it was understandable why serial killer David Simelane murdered 32 women … it was because he had once been falsely accused by a woman of raping her.

He wrote, ‘Simelane once said he had served a prison term of seven years for a rape he never committed, which was the reason he had so much resentment towards women.’

Commentators on social networks, including Facebook, were quick to condemn Dlamini. Some are suggesting an advertising boycott against the Times of Swaziland, the group that owns the Times Sunday.

Dlamini is no stranger to controversy. In May 2012 he was suspended after he wrote that he was a proud homophobe and he hated homosexuals. Times Sunday editor Innocent Maphalala ‘unreservedly’ apologised after an ‘unprecedented’ number of readers complained.

Friday, 7 December 2012

IN SWAZILAND, CHILD RAPE NOT UNUSUAL

A total of 170 cases of rape of children under the age of 11 have been reported to police in Swaziland since January 2011.

A one-year-old child was among the victims.

Shocking though this news is; this is not unusual in Swaziland where children are routinely sexually and physically abused, often inthe name of ‘Swazi culture’. They are whipped, raped, starved, traded for sex, flung into jail for being poor, and thousands of them head up households.

The 170 cases were revealed by Swaziland Police Commissioner Isaac Magagula during the commemoration of Sixteen Days Against Gender-Based Violence on Wednesday (5 December 2012).

These figures are only the cases of rape that were reported to police, evidence suggests that many more cases go unreported. In 2008, Unicef reported that one in three girls in Swaziland were sexually abused, usually by a family member and often by their own fathers - 75 percent of the perpetrators of sexual violence were known to the victim.

Swazi culture is so perverted that many men believe it is all right torape children if their own wives are not giving them enough sex. In 2009, men who were interviewed during the making of the State of the Swaziland Population report said they ‘“salivate” over children wearing skimpy dress codes because they are sexually starved in their homes.’

The State of the Swaziland Population report also said that Swazi men blamed ‘modernisation’ for giving women and girls the idea that they do not need to obey their menfolk.

Not only are children abused by their families, each year scores of schoolteachers are investigated for having sex with their pupils.

According to one newspaper report, one of the reasons teachers get away with child abuse is that parents, especially in rural areas, ‘sold’ their daughters in return for groceries from male teachers.

When children are not being raped by their teachers they are being tortured in the name of discipline.

In October 2011, Swaziland was told by the United Nations Human Rights Periodic Review it must stop flogging children at school because it violated their human rights. But the fact that the practice of whippings is so ingrained in Swazi schools was demonstrated by Sibongile Mazibuko, President of the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT), who said at the time he was surprised that inflicting corporal punishment was against a child’s rights.

The Save the Children organisation told the United Nations the treatment of children in Swaziland schools amounted to ‘torture’.

There are countless examples of extreme and often perverted use of corporal punishment in schools. At Mpofu High School girls are flogged by teachers on their bare flesh and if they resist they are chained down so the beating can continue. They get up to 40 strokes at a time.

At Phonjwane primary school teachers lined up to whip 20children. Each child received 27 lashes as nine teachers took it in turn to give each one three cuts. The children’s crime? They had been watching two boys fighting.

A nine-year-old primary school child from the Mafucula area in the Lubombo region was whipped with a sjambok so badly by her teacher she died of her injuries.

A 10-year-old girl at kaLanga Nazarene Primary school was blinded for life in her left eye after a splinter from a teacher’s stick flew and struck it during punishment. And she was not the child being punished. She was injured when her teacher was hitting another pupil, with a stick which broke.

Thirty five pupils of Oslo High School were whipped after a cell phone rang during a lesson. On this occasion a group of teachers illegally beat each member of the class.

At Lusoti Primary, teachers beat all the children in the school after one pupil made a noise in assembly.

Children at Emtfonjeni High School are whipped with up to 10 strokes of a stick, if their school fees are not paid.

The principal at Elangeni High even publicly flogs adults who date pupils at his school. The men are forced to attend in front of the entire school, lie down on a bench and receive a whipping. The girls are also flogged.

Wednesday, 5 December 2012

MID-YEAR BUDGET REVIEW REPORT IN FULL

The Swaziland Mid Year 2012-13 Budget Review Report presented in November 2012 by Majozi Sithole, Minister of Finance.

Read the full report here.

Swaziland Mid Year 2012-13 Budget Review Report

Tuesday, 4 December 2012

DEATH PENALTY TEST FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Two more men have been sentenced to hang in Swaziland this past week.

This comes after Chief Mgwagwa Gamedze, Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, told a United Nations group that although the kingdom retained the death penalty it was ‘abolitionist in practice’.

The men, both named Simelane, were involved in separate cases before the courts. David Simelane had his conviction for killing 28 women and children over a period of about 10 years upheld by the Supreme Court.

The other man, Mciniseli Jomo Simelane, was convicted by the Swazi High Court of killing a seven-month-old baby when he set fire to a house.

The death sentences once again put the spotlight on Swaziland’s human rights record.

In October 2011, Swaziland was heavily criticised at the UN Universal Periodic Review into human rights in the kingdom for continuing to have the death penalty. Gamedze told the UN that although the death penalty existed in Swaziland the last execution had been in 1983. He said this showed that the kingdom was abolitionist in practice.

But, in April 2012, Gamedze told the Times of Swaziland the kingdom would not follow the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and abolish the death penalty. Gamedze said for the time being, the kingdom was not ready to accede to the convention.

He said at the time that David Simelane would not hang, unless the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal against the death penalty. Simelane has now lost that appeal.

International anti-capital punishment groups estimate that about seven people are waiting for execution on ‘death row’ in Swaziland.

Contrary to Gamedze’s assertion that Swaziland is abolitionist, the kingdom has been advertising on and off for years to appoint a hangman. But so far, no one has been given the job.

Monday, 3 December 2012

KIDS WHO COMMIT NO CRIME LOCKED UP

Children in Swaziland are being locked up in juvenile detention, even though they have committed no crime.

And, Isaiah Mzuthini Ntshangase, Swaziland’s Correctional Services Commissioner, is encouraging parents to send their ‘unruly children’ to the facility if they think they are badly behaved.

Ntshangase was speaking at the open day of the Juvenile Industrial School at the Mdutshane Correctional Institution. He told the Times Sunday newspaper in Swaziland, ‘Noticing the strife that parents go through when raising some of their children who are unruly, we decided to open our doors to assist them.’

The school not only corrected offenders but assisted ‘in the fight against crime by rooting out elements from a tender age’, the newspaper reported him saying. The children ‘will be locked up, rehabilitated and integrated back to society’, the Times reported.

The school accommodates pupils who were both in conflict with the law as well as delinquents, the Times said. There are presently 279 children locked up.

Although the newspaper did not say so, this means children who have committed no crime and have not been sentenced by the courts are locked up alongside criminals and treated as if they had broken the law.

The Times interviewed some of the inmates and found a 15-year-old girl locked up by her guardian because she had developed a relationship with a boyfriend that the guardian did not like.

Another girl interviewed was an orphan who ‘lived a town life’. She was reported saying, ‘In our dormitories which we share, we are deprived all the nice and good things.’

She added the rules at the institution were tough, ‘This place is not for the faint-hearted because you lose a lot of privileges that are freely accessible outside. There is neither clubbing, drinking nor time for boys.’

One unemployed father of an 11-year-old boy said he put his son in the facility because he did not have money to pay school fees. ‘I am grateful that my son is in school. I cannot afford his education because I am old. My wish is that he finishes school to earn a decent living,’ he said.

The guardian of one girl said before she was admitted at the school, she had not been able to contain her behaviour. ‘My biggest problem was that I had lost her. She dropped out of school together with my niece (sister’s daughter) who is an orphan,’ she said.

Children reported that they were not beaten but they were badly fed, getting their supper at around 3pm, which meant they went to bed hungry.

This is not the first time the Swazi juvenile correction facility has been under the spotlight.

In August 2010 it was revealed that a 12-year-old boy was serving one year in Mdutshane because he insulted his grandmother. He had been sentenced to an E300 fine (about US$40), but was too poor to pay so was jailed instead.

In April 2010 it was reported that a 10-year-old boy was serving ten years at the same correctional facility. Reporters were unable to discover what the boy had done to be locked up.

Sunday, 2 December 2012

TAKE FROM THE KING, GIVE TO POOR: IMF

Swaziland should spend less on King Mswati III and his Royal Family and give the money saved to projects to help the poor, a new report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) report says.

The report believes that it is as vital to address this imbalance between the rich and the poor in the kingdom as it is to get the national finances sorted.

The report, Restoring Sustainability in a Changing Global Environment: Options for Swaziland, written by three experts independent of the IMF, which is due to be published later this month (December 2012), studies the financial crisis that has hit the kingdom, ruled by King Mswati, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

The report says the kingdom not only has to address what it calls ‘a pure fiscal crisis’ but also ‘poverty and inequalities’.

It says ‘[T]here is scope to reduce sovereign and security spending in order to create the fiscal space for higher social expenditure.’ This means less spending on the King, Royal Family, police and army and more on such as schools, hospitals and food security programmes.

To make this change, the report states, ‘Swaziland would need to secure a broad political and social consensus on reforms and make continued progress on strengthening the quality of its institutions.’

It goes on, ‘Swaziland is often perceived, domestically, as having a “social” fracture, where resources are not allocated according to a clear objective of alleviating poverty. Reducing the social fracture is not just about reforms, but also their dissemination and eventually endorsement by the whole population.’

It says that ‘improving transparency and accountability would be as essential as implementing all the required [financial] reforms’.

The report concludes, ‘In addition, all the sacrifices that may be needed by Swaziland to restore fiscal and external sustainability would need to be shared in a fair manner. From that perspective, the share of social spending would have to increase, to protect the most vulnerable people.’

The IMF has in the past drawn attention to the need for wealthier people in Swaziland to take their share of the hardships that are necessary to restore the strength of the kingdom’s economy.

Last month, the IMF said budget cuts, ‘[W]ill require sacrifices by all segments of Swazi society, but the basic needs of the most vulnerable should be protected as far as possible.’

In November 2011, Joannes Mongardini, leader of the IMF mission to Swaziland, suggested to the BBC that even King Mswati and the Royal Family should play their parts in reducing their budgets.

The IMF has already said that Swaziland’s economy is in such a poor state there need to be immediate cuts in public spending if the government is to meet its own budget forecasts. Next year even more cuts will be needed, the IMF said, because the Swazi Government has failed to make important changes to the economy that would increase revenue for the government and reduce unnecessary spending on ‘investment projects that are not effective in fighting poverty’.

Although the IMF does not name it, the building of Sikhuphe Airport, often referred to in the international community as King Mswati’s vanity project, would be one project that should not be funded.

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