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EBC IYANHLANHLATSEKA IN ITS CIVIC EDUCATION

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I have keenly followed, through the press, progress of the civic education exercise by the Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC) ahead of next year’s general elections and have been left wondering if it had extended its mandate to prescribing candidates to the electorate.


Successive EBC commissioners have been reported by the press as prescribing the kind of candidates voters should elect come 2018. Given that their mandate is to deliver a free and fair election whenever the nation goes to the Hastings, it is unlikely that the EBC can deliver on its mandate ostensibly because they are not tasked to prescribe who the voters should elect.


As I see it, the EBC iyanhlanhlatseka and needs to be reprimanded and reined in and lawmakers must come to the party and stop the EBC from influencing voters’ choices and concentrate on empowering the electorate on the election process. In terms of attributes of candidates, they should stick to what the law prescribes, that is as far as who does not qualify to participate and not to go into the physical, intellectual, spiritual, etc., attributes of persons the electorate should vote for.


The EBC have gone beyond their call, including benchmarking profiles of who they consider to be the perfect candidates with certain individuals. If this is not already campaigning for those individuals to the prejudice of others by a body of persons who is responsible for overseeing the process, and who are supposed to be neutral, then something is terribly wrong here.


As it were, the EBC have not even been convincing in past elections when it comes to delivering on the core mandate of ensuring fair and free elections in all the stages of the process.


Take the last elections in 2013, for an example, the EBC prematurely fed wrong information to His Majesty King Mswati III on the status of the process, and the Sovereign went on to publicly pronounce the elections as having been free, fair and successful. What happened thereafter was an embarrassing floodgate of cases before the courts in which candidates were contesting the credibility and validity of the process. Unfortunately, one cannot comment on the efficacy of the courts in dealing with these matters especially once after the King had declared the process an unqualified success.


It is not only the issue of the EBC prescribing candidates to the voters but also positioning itself as the mouthpiece of the Tinkhundla political system. Yes, one of the EBC’s motor mouths in one of their voter education exercise deliberately misinformed the electorate that the Tinkhundla political system was even practiced in Great Britain. Of course that was being economical with the truth, calculated to mislead the gullible electorate to legitimise a flawed political system. Every discerning individual knows that while Great Britain, like the Kingdom of eSwatini, is also a monarchy but its political system is a multiparty democracy.


As I see it, one of the inherent weaknesses – there is after all a plethora of them - of the obtaining political hegemony is its abysmal and repugnant immorality that promotes a culture that is at variance with honesty and the truth. That is why commissioners of the EBC can lie unashamedly with straight faces because they become instant national heroes with no credibility to protect. Consequently, anyone speaking the truth to power is maligned and their character assassinated and branded an enemy of the State.


Yet had the EBC kept to their mandate, as prescribed by the national constitution and also articulated in the enabling electoral legislation, they would have avoided lokunhlanhlatseka. On the other hand, one cannot help but hazard that perhaps their actions may be deliberately to curry political favour to secure future appointments to public office. I rest my case!
On another trajectory, government’s public display of posthumous humanity towards fallen former prime ministers, particularly in the case of Sotsha Dlamini, is bewildering.
At least the case of Obed Mfanyana Dlamini is cushioned by the fact that he had not been left in the wilderness but was serving in Liqoqo, the King’s advisory body, at the time of his demise. So in a way he was being looked after even if this was not deliberate in the absence then of a policy of how former PMs should be treated.


The same cannot be said of Sotsha Dlamini. Long before his demise the press periodically carried articles of his struggles after leaving office. It was not after the incumbent Sibusiso Barnabas Dlamini created his golden retirement nest that questions were raised about the other former premiers. Then some crumbs were thrown in their direction just to silence the murmurs. But even those crumbs were so meagre that they paled into insignificance comparative to the massive package the incumbent has prepared for himself upon leaving office, of course assuming he will ever be retired.


Then out of the blue government sees it fit to support and care for these men in death with State funerals when it never cared how they lived and survived after leaving office. Surely, this nation has no second when it comes to hypocrisy not just in relation to the matter of the late former PMs but also in just about everything else.
Well, after all, perverting the truth is the stock-in-trade of the obtaining Tinkhundla political system. 

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