AFP REPORTS PLOT TO OUST SWAZI KING

The following is a report issued today (26 February 2011) by the AFP international news agency.

SOURCE

Facebook group urges overthrow of Swaziland’s king

MBABANE, Swaziland (AFP) – A Facebook group is calling for the overthrow of Swaziland’s king, Africa’s last remaining absolute monarch, through protests inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Lybia.

Known as The April 12 Uprising!!! it promises, “all hell will break loose in Swaziland” on April 12 2011 when “a hundred thousand men march into the country’s city centres to declare a democratic Swaziland free of all royal dominance.”

April 12 is the date in 1973 when political parties were banned, a ban still in place under king Mswati III.

Modelled on Facebook groupings in Tunisia and Egypt, the April 12th group says the winds of change will sweep through Swaziland next as “there is a large population of politically and economically disenfranchised people living under a dictator”.

“We are a pro-democracy group. We are not at all affiliated to any political party or formation,” the group’s founder, Jahings Dada told AFP.

With under 500 members, the Facebook group is still far from its 100,000-strong target. The majority of people in this impoverished nation do not have access to the Internet.

Dada says the group also has street organisers in major centres recruiting people on the quiet. He only fears the authorities’ reaction.

“The only misgiving I have about starting this group is that I know Mswati will send his soldiers to beat and kill protesters. It’s a given,” Dada told AFP.

Roughly one billion rand ($142 million, 103 million euros) of the current budget has been set aside for the police and army - roughly equivalent to the health budget in this country which has the worst AIDS epidemic in the world).

“Yes, we are spending a lot on the army but we are not anticipating what is happening in North Africa to come here,” Finance Minister Majozi Sithole told journalists, “however, the army is there to avoid such situations.”

The Swazi police have a history of crushing protests. Last year Swazi police arrested nearly 50 activists to prevent pro-democracy demonstrations.

WILL STUDENTS SPARK UPRISING?

Students in Swaziland are planning to bring the kingdom to a standstill for four days in March to protest against Swazi Government policies on tertiary education.

Maxwell Dlamini, President of the Swaziland National Union of Students (SNUS), said the protest would see the ‘mother of all marches’.

The students are angry that they were not properly consulted on a new government policy that means scholarships to study at tertiary institutions will be replaced by loans. All personal allowances for accommodation and food will be abolished.

Dlamini said, ‘On March 14, 15, 16 and 17 we will bring the country to a standstill. Parents, teachers, pupils, workers and other interested parties will take part in what we regard as a mother of all marches. We will spend four days in Mbabane and by the look of things; schools and government offices will be affected. We are doing this out of frustration because the Scholarship Policy is not what students want and we want government to publicly revoke it.’

The Swazi News, an independent newspaper in Swaziland, today (26 February 2011) reports Dlamini saying students had approached workers’ unions and other formations, such as the Swaziland United Democratic Front (SUDF), to assist them during the planned mass protest.

The threat of unrest comes at a delicate time in Swaziland. Ordinary people, emboldened by the events in the Middle East and North Africa where dictatorships have been overthrown in recent weeks, are planning to take to the streets on 12 April 2011 to ‘topple’ King Mswati III, who is sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

A group calling itself the April 12 Uprising is coordinating events, using a Facebook site.

The April 12 Uprising is not formally linked to the student movement in Swaziland, but it is clear that it is a loose group dominated by youth. Many of the April 12 supporters are almost certainly also presently students in Swaziland, or recent graduates.

The involvement of youth is significant because in the Middle East and North Africa, the youth were the ones who got the protests started. Once on the streets others quickly joined the youth.

In Swaziland, the students are very experienced at mobilizing class boycotts and marches on the streets. If the students and workers take to the streets over the scholarship issue, it is possible that the protests would quickly expand to include demands for democracy and possibly even the removal of King Mswati.

Then anything might happen.

A striking feature of the pro-democracy events in the Middle East and North Africa is how quickly the protests grew, which must mean there were a lot of angry people just waiting for the chance to overthrow their rulers. Also, the rulers capitulated very quickly.

That is of significance to Swaziland, because we might discover that most people in the kingdom (three in ten are so poor they are under nourished and 63 percent live in abject poverty) might be happy to see King Mswati go, if they felt that their lives would be better for it.

That would test the loyalty of the king’s supporters. What power-base does King Mswati really have? Would the army support him for long, especially if they were required to shoot their own people following an uprising? In Swaziland, about 95 percent of people are from the same Swazi ethnic group and they are all related to one another in some way, so it would be like shooting your own family.

SWAZILAND ARMS DEAL ‘IS STILL ON’

Swaziland is still trying to buy the US$60m (E429 million) worth of weapons, the UK Government refused to allow.

John Kunene, Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, who signed the original deal in 2008 said the kingdom had never given up trying to buy the weapons.

It was revealed by Wikileaks this week that the Swazi Government wanted to buy the weapons through an arms broker in the UK called Unionlet. The UK Government refused to allow the deal to go through because it believed the weapons would be used by the Swazi Government to suppress its own people, or they would be sold on to another country, possibly Zimbabwe or Iran.

Among the weapons were assault rifles, heavy machine guns, armoured personnel carriers and helicopters.

The Swazi News, an independent newspaper in Swaziland, reports today (26 February 2011) that Kunene is still trying to broker a deal.

‘We have been in constant discussion with Unionlet in buying arms for peacekeeping exercises in other countries, and have never abandoned the idea,’ the newspaper reports Kunene saying.

Kunene said the United Nations would reimburse the money Swaziland spent on the weapons. He said the weapons would be kept in Swaziland.

He attacked Maurice Parker, the former US Ambassador to Swaziland, who had raised concerns in 2009 that the weapons could be used to suppress the Swazi population or be sold on.

He told the Swazi News that Parker’s allegation was ‘unfortunate’ and he accused him of interfering in the affairs of Swaziland.

The Swazi News reported Kunene saying, Swaziland is a sovereign state and can purchase anything, including arms, as long as the laws have been followed. ‘This will mean there is interference into the affairs of the country.’

See also

SWAZI ‘SECRET ARMS DEAL FOR IRAN’

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2011/02/swazi-secret-arms-deal-for-iran.html

GOVERNMENT MISLEADS ON POVERTY

The Swaziland Government wants us to believe there has been a ‘significant’ drop in poverty in the kingdom – but we are not fooled.

The Ministry of Economic Planning and Development released a report yesterday (24 February 2011) showing that the poverty level in Swaziland was 63 percent of the total population – down from 69 percent ten years ago, when the last survey was taken.

This drop, according to a report from the Ministry, was ‘modest but still significant’. Modest, yes: significant, no.

Look at the figures. The actual number of poor people in Swaziland fell from 678,500 to 641,000 within the past decade. That’s a drop of 37,500 over ten years. That averages out at 3,700 per year.

There are still 641,000 people in poverty in Swaziland and at the rate of 3,700 per year it will take 173 years before all the people are out of poverty.

The report called Poverty in a Decade of Slow Economic Growth: Swaziland in the 2000s claimed that Swazi people had benefited from the average two per cent economic growth experienced over the last 10 years.

Some people may have benefited, but it certainly wasn’t the poor. Missing from the report was any indication of how much money the top 10 percent richest people in Swaziland had.

‘Poverty’ in the report was defined as households with an income of less than E461 per (US$65) month, per adult. Or US$2 per day.

But three in ten people live in the most abject poverty in Swaziland, ruled by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

The king takes about E300,000 from the national budget each and every day of the year for himself and his Royal Family.

The report stated, ‘Overall nearly three in 10 persons fall short of meeting their daily nutritional needs and the situation remains the same as the beginning of the decade.’

This is not the first time the Swaziland Government has tried to falsely claim that it is making headway in reducing poverty. In October 2010, the Swazi Government doctored an official report to the United Nations on how much progress Swaziland had made on reaching a Millennium Development Goal. The government changed it from reading ‘not likely’ to meet the target of ‘eradication of extreme poverty and hunger’ and made it read that it could ‘potentially’ meet the target.

See also

ATTACK ON LYING SWAZI GOVERNMENT

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2010/10/attack-on-lying-swazi-government.html

RISE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN SWAZILAND

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.

To read the full article, click here.