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.

SIKHUPHE: FANTASY THAT NEVER DIES

Could the propagandists in Swaziland please get their stories straight about the opening of Sikhuphe International Airport.

About 10 days ago they told a bunch of Taiwanese businesspeople it would open in October 2010.

Now, they’ve told a different group of Taiwanese it’ll be ready by the end of March 2011.

I get the feeling they just make it up as they go along.

Those readers of this blog with the stamina to follow my Fantasy Watch game will know that the completion date for the airport, estimated to cost one billion US dollars by the time it is finished, keeps moving.

King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, who came up with the idea for the airport in the first place, confidently told the world it would open in March 2010.

But March 2010 came and went and no airport is operational. Then Barnabas Dlamini, the man the king illegally-appointed Prime Minister, said it would open for the FIFA World Cup in June 2010. It didn’t.

In the latest attempt to convince the world that Sikhuphe will eventually open, a group of Taiwanese journalists were taken for a visit to the site. In typical Swazi fashion the two fellows leading the jaunt told journalists they were not authorised to make statements to the press.

Personally, I don’t blame them. Anything they say about the airport could come back and bite them on the bottom.

I’ve been monitoring the statements made about the airport over the past year or so and it’s clear to me that no one is telling the truth – either about the completion date or about how many airlines are going to want to use the airport when (if?) it does open.

According to a report in the Times of Swaziland, the kingdom’s only independent daily newspaper, ‘managers were working on developing new routes to bring long-haul flights from across the world. At the moment, the Matsapha International Airport handles between 70 000 to 80 000 passengers annually; while Sikhuphe will handle up to 300 000 passengers a year. The terminal here has been designed to handle about 300 people per hour.’

We’ve heard this before when it was claimed Etihad Airways of the United Arab Emirates wanted to use the airport. We’ve heard nothing since from Etihad.

Take a tip from me don’t believe a word they say about Sikhuphe.