1 IN 4 SWAZI LIVE IN STICK HOUSES

While King Mswati III of Swaziland has 13 palaces, nearly one in four of his subjects live in ‘stick and mud’ houses.

And another 7 percent of Swazi people live in houses made of mud bricks.

Nobody who has watched the way King Mswati spends the money of the Swazi people lavishly on himself will be surprised by these figures.

Even the keenest observers of the king’s lifestyle find it difficult to keep up with his luxury purchases. In recent years he has purchased 20 Mercedes cars and a Rolls Royce Phantom. He has at least 13 palaces (one of each of his wives) and since he recently married wife number 14, we must expect another palace to be built soon.

Figures revealed in 2009 suggest that the Swazi people are spending E300,000 per day on the upkeep of the Royal Family. In Swaziland, seven out of ten people live in abject poverty, earning less than E10 per day.

Details of Swaziland’s 2007 Population and Housing Census, just published, show 23 percent of the population live in stick and mud houses.

The report states that the quality of housing is ‘often used as a measure of the standard of living of a country and one of the most leading indicators of development. Better housing conditions are essential for human survivorship’.

The report also states that 40 percent of the ‘economically active’ or working population in Swaziland is unemployed, That means 136,105 people are without work, double the number unemployed when the last census was taken in 1997.

Women in the country have the highest unemployment rate, being 47.7 per cent, compared to 33.6 percent men. The combined national unemployment rate is 40.6 per cent.

The economically active (labour force) is constituted of 335,093 people. These are people who ‘qualify’ to participate in the labour market but find themselves without jobs.

The report states that urban areas have an unemployment rate of 14.6 percent for males and 25.9 percent for females compared to 40 percent and 53 percent respectively for the rural areas.

SWAZI FINANCE MINISTER CASH ‘HOAX’

A cash windfall for social projects worth at least E100m (10m US dollars) promised by Swaziland’s Minister of Finance may not exist.

I reported in March 2009 that Majozi Sithole told the Swazi Parliament that the government had managed to retrieve the E28m it had spent (illegally) on a deposit for a private jet for King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

Sithole said the money had grown from E28m and with interest it was now worth E100m. The money was reported to be from donor agencies and was be used for unnamed social projects in Swaziland.

I doubted the truth of the statement at the time and now it seems I am not alone.

According to the Times of Swaziland, the kingdom’s only independent daily newspaper, the E100m has now grown to E400m, but nobody knew where the money is. The newspaper calls the claim that the money exists ‘a hoax’ and asks has the ‘Swazi nation been taken for a ride?’

The money was said to be under the trust of Professor Frans Whelpton at the University of South Africa. It was also said that the donors refused to allow the money to be given directly to the Government of Swaziland. By the government’s own admission about E40m a month is lost to corruption in Swaziland.

Whelpton told the Times that he has not received any money and he doesn’t know who the donors are.

The Times said the funds would no longer come from Canada as had originally been announced but would now come from Germany.

In an interesting twist this week, Barnabas Dlamini, Swaziland’s illegally-appointed prime minister, tried to blame Whelpton for the confusion.

According to the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati, Dlamini told a breakfast meeting that Whelpton was involved in the project of his own accord and that the Swazi Government were ‘extra careful in our dealings with him’.

Dlamini went on to say, ‘We’re waiting to see whether the donor money is there as promised by him.’

The incompetence of the government is staggering. The whole sorry affair stared because the government had secretly and illegally entered into a contract to buy a private jet for the king. When news leaked out and the outcry travelled around the world, the government was forced to abandon the contract and lost the E28m deposit.

This was in 2002 and since then the government has often told the Swazi people the money is to be refunded. And each time, nothing happens.

I doubt if much will come from the present debacle. I can’t see any connection between a lost jet deposit worth E28million and E400 million of donor funds for health and education projects.

What I can’t work out is whether the Swazi Government is simply lying to get itself out of a hole or whether the prime minister and the finance minister genuinely believe that donor agencies would be so lax as to give a professor E400m to spend as he saw fit in Swaziland.

And the final twist in the saga: the company that was to provide the jet has an outstanding court claim against Swaziland for breach of contract – for a cool E47m.

SWAZI UNIVERSITY LANGUAGES GAFFE

Sometimes you have to laugh out loud at some of the things Swazi leaders do.

The latest guffaw comes at the news that Cisco Magagula, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Swaziland (UNISWA), has raised concerns over the rate of unemployment in Swaziland.

He told a careers day at the university on Friday (3 April 2009) that there was a need to ‘create employability’ in the kingdom.

At the same event Republic of China on Taiwan Ambassador Leonard Chao encouraged the students to consider studying foreign languages. He said speaking more than two languages put people at an advantage when seeking work.

Who could disagree that in the global economy languages are important?

Well Magagula for a start. Last year he closed down the Modern Languages department at UNISWA. He did this without consultation with the department or the department’s host faculty. There is now only one modern languages lecturer in the university.

If UNISWA is serious about graduating students who are employable in the modern age they need to be a bit more far sighted than this.

GO FIGURE, SWAZI FINANCE MINISTER

Swaziland Finance Minister Majozi Sithole’s is in a bit of a hole.

In his recent budget speech he managed to mislead the Swazi people on two occasions by giving statistics that were not true. The question now is: did he lie or is he just no good at his job?

The two cases involve a long standing dispute over the purchase of a private jet for King Mswati III and the unemployment figures.

The king’s jet first: seven years ago Sithole, then as now Finance Minister, and Swaziland’s present illegally-appointed Prime Minister Barnabas Dlamini, who was also PM at the time, were leaders in a secret plot to buy the king his own jet. When news leaked out there was an outcry both inside Swaziland and abroad and the purchase was dropped, but not until Swaziland taxpayers had been forced to lose E28 million (2.6 million US dollars at today’s exchange rate) on a deposit.

Since the scandal was exposed in 2002, the Swazi Government has been telling the people that it is close to getting the deposit back. In his budget statement last week (27 February 2009), Sithole said the money was now on its way. When questioned on this is said that his government had been able to secure not E28 million, but E100 million.

The Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati III, reported Sithole then said the E100 million represented the E28 million, plus interest at the rate of 10 percent per year.

Let’s halt there. Ten percent of E28 million is E2.8 million. Multiply that annual interest by the number of years this saga has been going on (seven) and you get E19.6 million. Add the deposit and the interest together and you get E47.6 million – nowhere close to the E100 million claimed by Sithole.

The discrepancy in Sithole’s arithmetic is plain for all to see, but no member of parliament questioned the figure and (frankly) the Observer made itself look pretty stupid by simply taking the minister’s word for it.

At least the kingdom’s only independent daily newspaper, the Times of Swaziland, eventually caught up with the fact that Sithole’s sums were wrong.

But by then the story had moved on. It seems a sum of E100 million does exist, and is in deposit in South Africa, but it is not the jet deposit. The money is reported to be from donor agencies and can be used for social projects in Swaziland, but it is not money that the Swazi Government is allowed to touch. The Finance Minister insists that this money is in fact the jet money.

Now, Lobamba Lomdzala MP Marwick Khumalo has raised suspicions in the House of Assembly. He says that if it turns out that Sithole has fooled the House about the jet deposit, a motion of a vote of no confidence against him would be moved. If Sithole loses this he should be sacked.

Now on to unemployment.

According to a report in the Times, Sithole announced during the National Budget Speech that the current unemployment rate for Swaziland stood at 28.2 per cent.

No it doesn’t. If only 222,771 people are employed from a labour force of 559,528, that means 336,757 are not employed. Now do the arithmetic: 336,757 as a percentage of 559,528 is 60.1 percent – nowhere even close to Sithole’s figure of 28.2.

If we are kind to Sithole and say he made a slip of the tongue and meant to say that only 222,771 people are UNemployed – it still gives an unemployment rate of 39.8 percent – 11 percent higher than what he told Parliament.

Where does he get the figures from? Does he just pull them from a hat and hope nobody will notice he’s talking nonsense?

So why the discrepancies? Did he lie to Parliament (and if so why?) or is he no good at his job?

Sithole delivered his ninth annual national budget as Finance Minister last month – you be the judge.