King Mswati IIIof Swaziland has ruled out any form of political dialogue with progressives in the kingdom who want democratic change.
The king, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, said the question of reviewing the political structures in Swaziland was a closed book that would not be opened.
King Mswati was speaking at the Smart Partnershipthis week in a tense meeting with journalists.
According to a report in the printed version of the Times of Swaziland, the only independent daily newspaper in the kingdom, today (23 July 2010), the question sparked an angry intervention from Prince Mahlaba, a member of Liqoqo, the shady group that advises the king.
Prince Mahlaba denounced Lushaba as ‘not Swazi enough’ to know what he was talking about. Prince Mahlaba claimed that the Swazi people were all behind the present system of government and did not want change.
When Prince Mahlaba allowed the king to answer the question, King Mswati said prospects of reviewing the kingdom’s political system were closed.
The Times reports that Lushaba told the king that political dissenters were also Swazi people and should be called so they could tell the king what their problems were.
King Mswati, who has banned political parties in Swaziland and branded groups who are in opposition to him terrorists, said dissenters would not be entertained.
The media in Swaziland are far too critical of the kingdom’s royal family.
Who says so? The royal family, of course.
I had another of those Laugh Out Loud moments when I read this in the Swazi Observer,the newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati III,sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.
Prince Masitsela, the king’s brother, told a so-called SMART partnership meeting that there was a growing trend where the media would carry sensational stories about Royalty. He said many of these were ill-conceived and anti-Swazi culture.
Prince Masitsela said there was a marked lack of respect in some media houses in Swaziland. ‘This was never heard of in our time. What you are doing is destroying the country and you must go back to the drawing board. We are not saying do not criticise, but when you do so, do so with responsibility, truthfulness and respect for your country.’
Another member of the royal family Prince Logcogco Mangaliso told the same meeting that in the past children were encouraged to read newspapers to get fresh information and to enrich themselves with knowledge. ‘I wonder if we can encourage them to do the same today,’ he said.
King Mswati himself said the media ‘should be professional at all times and adhere to the spirit of respect, nation building and the promotion of peace’.
Of course it’s all nonsense. The media in Swaziland are not disrespectful of the king and the royal family, or of power in general.
As I revealed in July 2008 in my research for the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) the opposite is the case.
The research concluded fear of monarchy and the power it has over the kingdom and media houses within it is by far the main cause of media censorship in Swaziland. This is both censorship imposed by King Mswati III and self-censorship. The king has threatened to close down titles that offend him and in recent history has done exactly that. There are also high levels of self-censorship around the king and the Queen Mother, since editors, aware of threats made in the past by the king, do not want to get themselves into trouble.
Since my report was published King Mswati has been personally involved in intimidating the media.In May 2009 he forced the Times of Swaziland to drop Mfomfo Nkhambuleas a columnist in the newspaper because of his outspoken views on the power structure in Swaziland. The king was also angered by reports in the media (also covered by the international press) that he had spent 2.5 million US dollars (about E25 million) on top of the range Mercedes cars for his wives.
Times publisher Paul Loffler was hauled before the king and told to produce invoices to back up his story about the cars and then he was forced to apologise when he couldn’t. These apologies appeared in both the Times and the Times Sunday.
King Mswati has intimidated the Times group before. In 2007 it was forced to make an apology or face immediate closure after it repeated a news agency report that was critical of the king.
Nkhambule gained international attention for his articles that appeared each Monday in the Times and were largely critical of Swaziland’s ruling elite, including the king. He was hauled in by Swaziland’s state police and threatened with torture if he continued to criticise the king. He was later dropped from his traditional regiment, threatened with banishment from his homeland, and his family was threatened because he refused to be silenced.
To read my full report on media censorship in Swaziland, click here.
A rally organised by Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO)for today (8 August 2009) will go ahead, although officially banned, according to organisers.
The rally is to support the community of Mahlabatsini in Matsapha, where 1,000 homesteads face eviction by Prince Masitsela,a brother of King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch. The rally will alsomark SWAYOCO’s 18th anniversary.
SWAYOCO Secretary General Thabile Zwane said the rally in Mahlabatsini will go ahead, but she expected police to try to stop it and arrests and beatings were likely.
She called upon the youth of Mahlabatsini and surrounding areas to come to their rally as SWAYOCO wants to address their problems as well plan how they could resists the looming evictions.
Earlier in a statement, SWAYOCO outlined the main issues to be addressed by the rally:
- stopping evictions of well over one thousand homesteads with a population of 15 thousand people to be directly affected.
- Intensifying the demand for decent jobs in the only industrial site of Swaziland against the casualisation of 90% of the workforce.
- launching the total onslaught on the fight for free and quality primary education for the 350,000 youth that currently has no access to any form of education in a population of only 958,000.
- the youth will also be demanding quality health care facilities in this area that is heavily affected by the HIV\AIDS scourge.
- an open and total rejection of the draconian piece of legislation (Suppression of Terrorism Act) whose nature and character is only meant to silence the youth and progressive people in their fight for freedom.
Zwane said they wanted to be in solidarity with the people of the area for the looming eviction but also to highlight the continued incarceration of Mario Masuku, President of the People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO)and Amos Mbedzi, both of whom are in jail awaiting trial on sedition and terrorism charges.
Zwane said, ‘What we are saying is that people must have the right to land, clean water, sanitation and electricity. Instead of wanting to evict the people Prince Masitsela must be advising the powers that be on how to improve the area as well as giving citizens the right to land.’
This is not the first time that Swazi authorities have banned SWAYOCO rallies. In February 2009 Swazi police brutally smashedup a SWAYOCO rally in support of Masuku at Msunduza Township in the Swazi capital, Mbabane. Four SWAYOCO leaders were arrested but later released without charge.
Manzini Regional Administrator Prince Masitsela says talk that there is no democracy in Swaziland or that the Swazi people are oppressed should be dismissed with the contempt they deserve. He noted in the Weekend Observer that the fact that some people can use the media and internet to hurl insults and vermin on the national leadership and nothing happens to them proves that Swaziland was far from becoming a dictatorship and that the leadership displayed a huge sense of tolerance. Link
AIDS is having an unprecedented impact on Swaziland. Life expectancy has fallen from 60 years to 31 years, the world's lowest figure, and one in three children are orphaned or left vulnerable from AIDS. Last year, about 40 percent of the population needed food aid.Link
Minister of Finance Majozi Sithole says a deficit in the national budget cannot be avoided. People should cut down on alcohol use and other expensive habits for the sake of their families and themselves, he said.Link
Prices of essential food items have risen 10-40 percent in 2008. There are now meat shortages in towns. World Vision reports that many Swazis in rural areas are down to one or two meals a day. Link
About 70 percent of the people in Swaziland are hungry; 40 percent are unemployed. In this group are over 120 000 orphans and large number of HIV infected people. Close to 30 percent of the population and that’s almost 300 000 of the sexually active group. Link
King Mswati III said his subjects were lazy and needed to work harder to ensure this year’s harvest was big enough to feed all of Swaziland with enough left over to export to other countries. Link
Swaziland has been placed among the top ten nations in a list of the ‘worst places to live’. This was because the kingdom is ‘afflicted with dire poverty and the world's highest HIV infection rate, the tiny southern African kingdom of 1 million has a shockingly low life expectancy of 32 – less than half the world's average. The royal family has a monopoly on the economy, and the majority of Swaziland's people live on about $1 a day.’ Link
In his predictions for 2009 the editor of the Swazi News prophesied this about Swaziland’s army, ‘They will rape anything on two legs, steal from shops, shoot to kill unprovoked and generally become loose cannons.’ Link
It seems that Swazi Prince Masitela (often described by the Swazi media as a ‘senior’ prince) has only just discovered that people in Swaziland are going hungry.
The prince, who is the regional administrator of Manzini, Swaziland’s business capital, now wants the National Disaster and Management Agency to distribute food rations to the hungry.
Masitela said people in urban areas do not have land to plough, unlike people in the rural areas.
I don’t want to be unnecessarily hurtful to the prince but it is obvious to anyone who every visits an urban area that there are poor and hungry people. How is it that he has only just noticed? I wrote earlier this monthabout the children who had to give up school to collect tin cans to sell in order (mostly unsuccessfully) to put food on the table.
Any visitor to a shopping complex car park in Swaziland will be aware of the large numbers of often quite small children who ‘sell’ misshapen spoons. Anyone who buys these spoons isn’t making a purchase because they want spoons, it is generally recognised that the spoons are a ‘front’ for begging. Without the generosity of the buyers, these children and their families would starve.
It is well known that over the past year about 650,000 of Swaziland’s one million population have received food aid from international donors.
In the Swazi Observer yesterday (29 October 2008) Masitsela is quoted saying that if the people in urban areas are hungry, they start engaging in crime.
This is almost certainly true, but the bigger crime here is the way in which ordinary people are treated in Swaziland. As I wrote last Friday (24 October 2008) http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2008/10/all-swazis-are-millionaires.html Swaziland isn’t a particularly ‘poor’ country by world standards. The problem is the wealth that is created goes to only a small group of people. And most of it goes to Prince Masitsela and the rest of the Royal Family.
Perhaps one way of solving the hunger problem is to force the prince and his family to give the Swazi people their fair shares.
