SWAZI WORKERS OPEN TO ABUSE

Workers in Swaziland are among the poorest in southern Africa. And this makes them wide open to exploitation by bosses seeking to drive down wages.

The plight of the Swazi worker has come to light with the news that textile factories in neighbouring South Africa might close down and move some of their business to Swaziland – because factory owners can get away with paying Swazis lower wages than South Africans.

Bosses are threatening workers in South Africa that they will close their factories and move to Swaziland if that country’s Bargaining Council goes ahead with its threat to force factories to pay the country’s minimum wage to textile workers.

More than 380 registered clothing factories, employing about 15,000 workers, do not pay minimum wages and are facing shut-down. All factories will have to pay 70 percent of minimum wages by the end of March 2011, and the full amount by April 2012. Should these targets not be met, the factories will be closed down.

Textile factories in Swaziland – many of them owned by Taiwanese companies – are notorious for the poor pay and conditions they inflict on their workers. By paying what amounts to near-slave wages, the companies are able to boost profits and maintain their share of the international cheap textile market.

It is believed that many workers in textile factories at present in Swaziland do not receive even the kingdom’s minimum wage that varies between E420 (US$57) a month for an unskilled worker and E600 (US $81) a month for a skilled worker.

The US State Department, in its 2009 Country Report [on Swaziland] on Human Rights said, ‘These minimum wages did not provide a decent standard of living for a worker and family. Migrant workers were not covered under minimum wage laws. Wage arrears, particularly in the garment industry, were a problem. The minimum wage laws did not apply to the informal sector, where most workers were employed.’

I have reported previously that Swaziland’s textile workers are so poorly paid that some exist close to ‘starvation’.

Women workers get paid much less than the minimum wage. I reported in January 2010 about the women workers in Matsanjeni who typically earned E160 a month and were forced to turn to prostitution to survive.

Some women textile workers reported they earned E5.50 per hour (about 85 US cents) and had to live six to a room and three to a bed to get by. They tried to share food as the cheapest meal for one person costs E10 and a piece of fruit costs E1.

In September 2008, police fired teargas and rubber bullets at textile workers at Zheng Yong Garment Factory who were peacefully demanding that they be paid holiday money that was rightfully owed to them.

In South Africa, the Industry National Bargaining Council minimum wage for a Millinery General Worker engaged in manufacturing millinery is set at E2,405.57 per month (nearly six times the minimum rate for an unskilled worker in Swaziland).

In Swaziland, Phiwayinkhosi Ginindza, the Swaziland Investments Promotion Authority (SIPA) Chief Executive, said the closure of factories in South Africa would come as an advantage to the kingdom in terms of job creation.

He told the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned and edited by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, Swaziland couldn’t take all 380 of the South African factories, because they would need infrastructure such as factory shells.

‘380 is a very large number and the country cannot accommodate such a number. We can accommodate those that we can,’ he said.

‘REFUGEE CRISIS’ AS ECONOMY SINKS

A refugee crisis could hit South Africa as Swaziland’s economy sinks and its people flock to leave the kingdom.

And South Africa, their probable intended destination, would be unable to cope with them.

As a result, countless Swazis would be displaced without jobs or health care in South Africa which has its own problems of poverty and unemployment.

The Associated Press (AP) news agency reports that the economic crisis in the kingdom ruled by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, could lead to a mass exodus of people across the border.

AP reports that trade and human traffic from Swaziland to South Africa has always been controlled and manageable. But what will happen when the occasional individual jumping a border fence multiplies by the thousands? The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommends a reduction of Swaziland’s government workforce by a third, by about 10 000 people.

In Swaziland it is reckoned that the wages and salaries of each employed person supports on average 10 people. Even Barnabas Dlamini, Swaziland’s illegally-appointed Prime Minister, has said that such a cut in jobs would bring civil unrest.

An economist attached to the Mbabane branch of a South African bank told AP, ‘It’s not a cash flow problem, like government says. It’s a structural problem. The public payroll is bloated way beyond what this country needs, as the IMF has been saying for years.

‘The banking sector is still inaccessible to a majority of Swazis who can’t avail themselves of financial services, and spending on non-essential big-ticket projects is still prioritised.’

The eventual end of the global recession will not remedy Swaziland’s economic crisis and the concomitant scenario of Swazis seeking jobs and humanitarian relief in South Africa. The IMF has noted that Swaziland’s economic decline pre-dates the current global slump by years, while other SADC (Southern African Development Community) countries were seeing robust gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign direct investment growth rates.

To read the full AP report, click here.

GOVERNMENT CUTS HIT POOR HARD

The impact of Swaziland’s economic meltdown on the poor of the kingdom is highlighted by the IRIN news agency. Even though the Swazi Government pledged not to make cuts in the education and health services in the kingdom, ruled by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, cuts to other government services, such as maintenance to roads and vehicles, is impacting on people’s lives. Many sick people cannot make it to hospital for treatment because there is no longer transport available.

IRIN interviews Thabsile Ndlovu, a widow in the mountainous northern Hhohho region, who has not been able to pay her children's school fees because she cannot travel to town to sell vegetables from her garden.

‘The buses are not coming to my area because the roads are now so bad,’ she says.

Recent heavy rains have made some roads impassable but the government announced this week that its fleet of road graders was inoperative because it lacked money to buy spare parts.

‘At the start of the financial crisis government told us that education and health would not be affected, but we find there are many ways these can be affected,’ said Stanley Dube, a financial consultant in the central commercial town of Manzini.



He noted that while government clinics may still be providing basic health services, many patients are finding it difficult to reach them.



Local humanitarian NGOs are also feeling the pinch following a government decision to cut financial support to such organizations by 14 percent.

To read the full IRIN report, click here.

DEPRESSING TRUTH ABOUT SWAZILAND

This is the latest article about Swaziland from the IRIN News Agency, which is distributed worldwide. It gives an accurate, but very pessimistic picture, of conditions in the kingdom ruled by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

And what a depressing picture it is: subsistence farmers are unable to plough their field because the government cannot afford to buy the fuel to run the tractors, unemployment is 40 percent, HIV infection is the highest in the world, but the government is cutting the amount of money spent on HIV budgets. Meanwhile, the Swazi Government awards itself huge salary increases and wastes money on unnecessary vanity projects while up to 10,000 civil servants are to lose their jobs and the chronically poor number seven in ten of the Swazi population.

SOURCE

SWAZILAND: A poorer government means more poor people

Mbabane, 7 December 2010 (IRIN) - Swaziland's declining revenue and a refusal to shelve prestige projects in the face of growing unemployment is exerting pressure on public health services and food production.



The government recently conceded that unemployment was running at 40 percent, despite doggedly maintaining for many years that it was 26 percent, but economists expect this to rise, pushing up already high poverty levels - about two-thirds of Swazis live in chronic poverty.



Subsistence farmers on communal Swazi Nation Land, where about 80 percent of the country's one million population reside, use government tractors for ploughing, but government fuel depots have run dry and the machines are standing idle.



"This is planting season. It is December now, and for six weeks we have not been able to get seeds in the ground," Joshua Mnisi, a farmer in the central Manzini region, told IRIN.



Renting a government tractor costs about US$19 an hour, but private contractors charge twice as much. The extent of the impact on food production will only be known once a food assessment survey is undertaken in 2011.



Swaziland has the world's highest HIV prevalence rate - 26.1 percent – so one in four Swazis between the ages of 15 and 49 is living with the virus, and about half of those infected, or 110 000, are on antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, which can prolong a person’s life.



Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini told the National Emergency Response Committee (NERCHA) that the budget for HIV/AIDS would be cut by 10 percent in 2011, just as efforts to intensify the roll-out of ARVs gets underway.



"The ARV rollout is a big budget expense, and the focus of our efforts. What happens now that government has less money to spend on life-saving measures?" said AIDS activist Vusi Kunene.



Public worker retrenchments



A spate of company closures from timber plantations to garment factories resulted in widespread retrenchments in 2010. The government is the country's largest employer, but a drop in revenue from sources such as the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) of about 70 percent compared to 2009, led Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini to warn that the financial squeeze could lead to public workers’ salaries not being paid.



SACU - the world's oldest customs union, comprising Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland - applies a common set of tariffs and disproportionately distributes the revenue to member states and has provided an economic lifeline to both Swaziland and Lesotho.



The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommended that the government cut its workforce by a third, or 10,000 employees, because the number of workers on the payroll was disproportionate to the country's size. Political opposition groups have blamed patronage and nepotism for the inflated payrolls.



Government has announced a reduction of 7,000 public service jobs in 2011.

The lay-off of public workers is expected to be cushioned by retirement packages, but the impact of such a substantial number of people being retrenched will have a ripple effect throughout the economy.



"This will result in the consumption rate of our goods and services falling due to less demand, and we will be affected one way or the other," said Fikile Nkosi, managing director of a major bank.



According to the government's Central Statistics Office, one employed person supports, on average, 10 others.



"The customary method of integrating former civil servants into private life is for them to use their government retirement pensions to open small businesses," said Amos Ndwandwe, an economist at a bank in the capital, Mbabane. "It takes years to make a successful business and many fail under normal circumstances, but it is complicated now because higher unemployment means fewer customers."



Numbers of poor increasing



However, government spending on non-essential programmes has not been cut. A recent request by the finance minister for an additional $50 million towards the building of an international airport was approved by parliament and the airport's final cost is expected to be in the region of $1 billion.



Cabinet officials have also awarded themselves substantial pay rises, and have extended retirement benefits to former government officials, contrary to IMF recommendations that public sector wage raises be curtailed. Swaziland is ruled by sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarch, King Mswati III.



"For decades government has paid lip service to poverty eradication while concentrating on investment in capital projects. The result is that while a Swazi middle class has expanded, this is just inertia brought on by population growth, because the number of poor has expanded also,” Ndwandwe said.



"In terms of proportion, the numbers are the same as what the UNDP [UN Development Programme] reported in the 1990s - about two-thirds of the people live on one dollar a day - there has not been a dent really in those who live in chronic poverty,” he noted



"All indications are that the percentage is going to change - as more business shut and public sector workers are laid off, it is inevitable that more people will join the ranks of the poor."

TRUTH ABOUT SWAZI KING’S GREED

Swaziland’s politicians are behaving as if the kingdom is on the brink of war and want to make sure their own bunkers are full of personal wealth before it starts.

That’s the verdict of one of the most active apologists for the Swazi elite, Musa Ndlangamandla, who is editor-in-chief of the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

Ndlangamandla, writing in his own newspaper, criticises the ‘orgy of looting, gobbling and self-enrichment by politicians in recent times’.

He writes, ‘When a country prepares for war – I am told – people hurriedly harvest the fields for storage in underground bunkers away from reach of enemy fire, money is withdrawn hastily to be stashed in ‘safe’ places, land is grabbed (the Mbabane style) by politicians for their own good and there is a general atmosphere of self-enrichment at the expense of taxpayers and the poor.’

He goes on to say that some people tell him that ‘some of our leaders are behaving as if they have another country to which they will go when Swaziland is in total ruin’.

I’m sure that many people would agree with Ndlangamandla about the politicians, but he misses one vital person in his analysis of why Swaziland is close to ruin: King Mswati himself.

In his article Ndlangamandla talks about the politicians ‘amassing prime land in exclusive suburbs in the capital at half the market price.

‘The dust has hardly settled on yet another act of looting where the politicians awarded themselves hefty perks that will see some of them take home over E1 million in golden handshakes when their controversy-laden term expires.’

He says Swaziland ‘is crying out for astute and exemplary leadership from government’.

Ndlangamandla says, ‘Moreover, we need to convince the poor – by action and deed – that we are all in the trenches with them by avoiding grandiose lifestyles in the face of abject poverty in most parts of the country. Our politicians should also lead by example and accept substantial slashes not only of their allowances, but also their overall perks.’

This is a tale of corruption and greed, but why should we be surprised that government ministers and MPs behave in this way when the King of Swaziland is the greediest of them all.

Why doesn’t Ndlangamandla ask how King Mswati managed to amass a huge personal fortune, estimated by Forbes to be 200 million dollars?

Can he not tell us how many personal bank accounts the king has outside of Swaziland?

King Mswati is the beneficiary of two funds created by his father Sobhuza II in trust for the Swazi nation. During his reign, he has absolute discretion over use of the income.

Why does the king live such a lavish ‘grandiose’ lifestyle with at least 13 palaces when 70 percent of his one million subjects lives in abject poverty earning less than one dollar (E10) a day?

And it is not just the King: his ‘Royal Family’ is estimated to cost the Swazi taxpayer E300,000 each and every day.

King Mswati is the one who is acting as if his kingdom is on the brink of war. His police, army and ‘security forces’ are being primed for a fight against ‘terrorists’ (that is, anyone who speaks out against the king and his regime) and once civil unrest starts, as it surely will, he will suppress it with brutal violence.

If Ndlangamandla wants to warn the people of Swaziland about the impending doom he should be honest and tell the truth about the king.