The Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN) has launched an online newsletter ‘to inform people all over the world about the political developments in Swaziland’.
The newsletter intends to fill a void in ‘these trying times for the banned liberation movement under the leadership of the People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO)’.
The first edition of the newsletter includes articles on the African National Congress ‘lashing’ the regime of King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch and a statement on the judgement on the killing of PUDEMO Deputy President Dr Thandokule Gabriel Mkhumane.
To see the first edition of the newsletter, click here.
More than 100 young people from Swaziland went to the 17th World Festival of Youth and Students to report on the struggle against the monarchy of King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.
And they said they fear possible arrest when they return to Swaziland, because they attended the festival, The Militantnewspaper, New York, reports.
More than 200 delegates attended a workshop about that fight for democracy in Swaziland at the festival in Pretoria, South Africa,
Militant reports, Pius Vilakati, 28, a student who led several marches protesting government cuts in education earlier this year, described how the police told him to ‘stop these demonstrations and threatened me’.
Vilakati told the story of Sipho Jele, who had been arrested along with others at a May Day demonstration for wearing T-shirts with the acronym PUDEMO.
The Peoples United Democratic Movement, the main opposition group in Swaziland, is banned. Jele died in police custody.
Shortly after speaking at the funeral for Jele, Vilakati learned police planned to arrest him and he managed to escape to South Africa.
Students from South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, and Mozambique joined the discussion on how to support the fight for democratic rights in Swaziland. Many said they had not known of the repressive conditions in the kingdom.
The Swaziland Coalition of Concerned Civic Organisations (SCCCO)has hit out at the greed of Barnabas Dlamini, the kingdom’s illegally-appointed Prime Minister, his deputy, four members of the Swazi Royal Family, at least nine cabinet ministers (past and present) and a gaggle of petty council officials, who are embroiled in a controversy over the purchase of Swazi nation land in Mbabane.
SCCCO says the million emalengeni they have saved themselves in the land purchase could have saved 500 of the jobs of civil servants that have to be cut in an attempt to gain International Monetary Fund (IMF) support for a loan after the Swazi economy went into meltdown after years of mismanagement by governments appointed by King Mswati III,sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.
The comments come in an end of year message delivered by Bishop Meshack Mabuza, the SCCCO chair.
The following is how the Times of Swaziland, the kingdom’s only independent daily newspaper, reported the statement. LINK
23 December 2010
‘E1million land discounts could have saved 500 jobs’
MBABANE – The Swaziland Coalition of Concerned Civic Organisations (SCCCO) has expressed discontent over the land purchase discounts received by ministers saying that money could have gone towards job saving.
In an end of year statement released yesterday touching on wide ranging issues, the SCCCO, through its Chairperson Bishop Meshack Mabuza, expressed concern in the manner in which the matter, which is now under parliament investigation, was handled.
"Look at the Circular No 1 which gives our politicians undeserved and unaffordable pay increases while at the same time they are calling for 7 000 of the lowly paid to become unemployed.
Allocate
"Look at how they allocate themselves E1 million discounts on land, how many jobs does that equate to? For those on the grade of a lowly office cleaner who earns E2 000 per month, that is 500 jobs that could have been saved, and 5 000 lives spared starvation, desperation and humiliation," he says.
The SCCCO also expresses concern over the issue of human rights.
"We stand beside our brothers and sisters whose pain was so openly and tragically expressed at our people’s parliament this month.
We will not let their stories be forgotten or their suffering ignored. If civil society is about one thing only, it is about calling those in power to account. The courts are an important way to stand up for our rights but they are not the only ones.
"We must recognise that we have to stand up for ourselves each and every day as well; we must retain our dignity in our homesteads, our families, our clans and our communities," it states.
Mabuza says as a Coalition they will continue to campaign for the ability for the people to claim their rights and human dignity.
Yesterday (22 December 2010), I criticised Thulani Thwala, the recently-appointed editor of the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati III, who claimed it was not a lapdog.
It is.
If you want to learn how journalism should be done in Swaziland you have to turn to the Nation magazine, a small independent monthly journal of comment. Alone among the news media in the kingdom, ruled by King Mswati, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, it fearlessly publishes news and information to assist readers to make informed decisions – the very thing, Thwala claimed for himself.
I’ve written before with admiration about the way the Nation reported in April 2008 about how King Mswati and the Royal Family were milking their subjects and illegally taking ‘obscene’ amounts money that was not due to them. It also covered in full the documentary Without the King that exposed the huge cavern between the king’s lifestyle and those of his subjects.
Bheki Makhubu, the Nation’s editor, writes in the December 2010 edition about how the Prime Minister is stealing from the people of Swaziland.
You will see also that the Nation is not afraid to refer to the Royal Family sex scandal of August 2010 that was reported throughout the world but ignored by the rest of the Swaziland media.
It is a crying shame that the Nation does not have a website so that its journalism can be seen throughout the world. Instead, it can only be purchased in Swaziland.
Below is the article from Makhubu, published in full. I am posting this for the benefit of readers outside of Swaziland, May I urge those of us who are inside Swaziland to support the Nation by buying it each month – and those of us who can, to support it by buyingadvertising space.
SPEAKING MY MIND
by Bheki Makhubu
The heat was unbearable, sweltering hot on that Thursday, October 16, 2008 when King Mswati III, arriving in the late afternoon to Ludzidzini Cattle byre told a stunned Swazi nation that he was returning Barnabas Dlamini as the prime minister of this country.
In the speech preceding the announcement, the monarch had thundered for some 35 minutes, complaining about the state of politics in the country. There is no doubt that His Majesty did not appreciate the lack of high-handedness in A.T. [Themba] Dlamini’s running of government before.
From that speech, A. T. came out looking weak, a man who had let His Majesty down terribly. What was needed, was a man like the present premier, someone who brooked no nonsense and would deal with the political madness the king saw in the country.
We all shouted ‘Bayethe’ when the king made the announcement. We all knew, though, that the decision was wrong. We knew it because we had all seen what the cantankerous man from KuKhanyeni was capable of when given power. But, we were helpless because the monarch had spoken.
Exactly, two years into office, the prime minister has shown his hand. This time, he is stealing from the people, abusing the trust His Majesty bestowed on him. It is worth noting that this is the second time in a few months that King Mswati III has been betrayed by a person he trusted completely. Earlier this year, then Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Ndumiso Mamba was exposed for having an affair with an Inkhosikati [wife of the king].
Now, Barnabas Sibusiso Dlamini is stealing from the Swazi people and, according to an interview he had with the Times of Swaziland, is very arrogant about it. He is plundering the country.
The Prime Minister and his cabinet team cut a deal for themselves, taking land in Mbabane at discounted prices. This is a city so broke the Municipal of Mbabane cannot even fix potholes.
Yet, our Prime Minister sees nothing wrong with it. He argues that the deal was not illegal. If that is the case, then why has he suspended such deals so that the law is changed to conform to the constitution.
A little lecture here would suffice. If a law is inconsistent with the constitution, it has no force of law the day it purports to come into effect and, if it existed when the constitution came into effect, then it becomes ineffective the day constitution came into force.
That’s the law.
I know, I know. The law is a foreign concept with our premier.
The Minister responsible for facilitating the deal, a woman who masquerades as a pastor, Lindiwe Dlamini, told Christians at a meeting recently that cutting land deals was what she did as a hobby. For her, therefore, stealing from the public to secure her longevity in cabinet comes as second nature to her.
And she calls herself a woman of God, anointed by the Holy Spirit to spread the word? What rubbish!
But then, this is what you get when you let people who have not been elected by the people to run the government. You know when I see the prime minister now, I see Hastings Kamazu Banda of Malawi. I see Mobuto Sese Seko of the then Zaire. I see Idi Aminof Uganda. All these were Africa’s despots who plunged their countries into economic and political quagmire while they lived the lives of kings.
These are men we have all learnt never to emulate if we want to be men and women of honour. No, not our Prime Minister. He thinks they were real men. Men of honour he can learn from.
They were unashamed to silence those who questioned what they did because they wanted to feed their greed without disturbance. In our Prime Minister, I see General Sani Abacha of Nigeria, a latter-day despot who plundered the riches of that oil rich country simply because they allowed him to run the country.
My take is that our Prime Minister is beyond caring what the people of our country think or say about him. He is doing what he wants as and when it pleases him.
Our country has collapsed into an economic mess under his watch.
He thinks nothing of it except making sure than his children and grandchildren will be taken care of when he is gone.
When he had an interview with the Times, he has cancelled the usual breakfast meeting with editors under the guise that the Incwala season had started. As if Incwala is a new concept that has come with him.
In cancelling the breakfast meeting, the premier showed he is a coward to boot. But bullies are like that. They can’t face those willing to take them on.
While he is quick to boast that he is the first and only prime minister with a university degree this country has ever had, he does not have the courage to meet editors, uneducated as they are, and explain his ‘brilliant’ idea of stealing from the people.
Instead, he found a lackey in the editor of the Times of Swaziland and tried to cleanse himself. It is a crying shame that Mbongeni Mbingo [the Times editor] listened to the balderdash and fed it to the public. He too should be ashamed of himself.
Anyways, let Sibusiso have his way. Akadle uMlangeni! Inkhosi iphakele.
As a thinker once said: “In a society in which there is little real economic productivity, power relationships are defined by conspicuous material wealth”.
We should not believe the recently-appointed editor of the Swazi Observer when he claims his newspaper refuses to be anyone’s lapdog.
Thulani Thwala reckons the Observer publishes ‘news and information to assist [readers to] make informed decisions’.
Writing in his own newspaper today(22 December 2010), he makes the outlandish claim that the Observer, a newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati III, is ‘getting closer and closer to our target of being the best read in the country’.
Nonsense. It is impossible to get official figures about the number of newspapers the Observer and its rival, the Times of Swaziland, the only independent daily in the kingdom, sell each day. But anyone in Swaziland with eyes to see and ears to hear knows that the Observer sells a fraction of the number of copies of the Times. And the reason for this is simple: people in Swaziland see the Observer for what it is: the mouthpiece of the king and ruling power in the kingdom.
Thwala should talk to his boss Musa Ndlangamandla, the Observer Chief Editor. Ndlangamandla was proud to state in March 2010, ‘... our collective stand as a newspaper is that the integrity of Swaziland as a democratic State and His Majesty King Mswati III as the legitimate leader of the Swazi nation, must never be compromised in any way.’
Thwala himself stated, in his article ‘We are a proud watchdog for King and country and refuse to be anyone’s lapdog.’ He is so wrong, the newspaper shouldn’t be a watchdog for the king, it should be a watchdog for the people.
If Thwala wants the Observer to be an independent newspaper that publishes ‘news and information to assist them make informed decisions’, let him publish details of the Swazi Royal Family sex scandal from August 2010 that was reported around the world but not in Swaziland.
Let him also explain to his readers how it is that King Mswati has a personal fortune, estimated by Forbes in 2009 to be US$ 2 million, when seven in ten of his subjects have to exist in abject poverty, earning less than US1 a day.
Once those reports appear in the paper we can believe the Observer is independent. Until then we should continue to see it merely as a propaganda sheet for the king.
