RIGHT TO LAND, SUBSEQUENT EVICTIONS

Before God created Man, He created heavens and the earth because land and resources are necessary to sustain and maintain life of all beings, plants, animals and human beings to be able to enjoy the right to life and be able to prosper economically and socially.

When God created the earth, He gave it free for humanity and all that lives in it. There were no conditions and we were expected to live in abundance by utilising all the resources that God left to our disposal, and in my view it would be ungodly to make people landless because no economic prosperity can take place to an individual at subsistence level if they did not have land to till, just as big business in industrial/ manufacturing sector and in mineral sectors will always require land to prevail and compete.

Remember God loved human kind so much that He created them in his own image and did not give life to Adam through remote control but He physically breathed into the nostrils of Adam to give him life, that is how much God values human kind and later when human kind had sinned, God again sent his only begotten Son to come down on earth to redeem us, such that though he had not sinned, He died for our sins. I am not intending to give a sermon in this article because pastors everywhere are better placed to do that, so don’t miss your Sunday services, I am only  affected and infected by the word of God because I am a born again Christian.

The principle point I want to deduce from the above assertion is that the order of God availed land and resources first before He created man and the central asset above all was land.
Before the promulgation of the constitution, according to Swazi Law and Custom land was acquired through kukhonta and naturalisation, on acquisition of Swazi Nation Land and land purchase on titled land, there was concession, which most had it came through some form of long term use for specific purpose such as sheep grazing. It is somewhat believed that some of the land that was leased without any purchase for grazing purposes ended up having title deeds, yet there was no purchase transaction that ever took place.

I should say this is just a rumour. It is also rumoured that in pre-independence era, land issues were handled in Pretoria and there were no systemic records for the leased land and the lapsing dates of some of these leases, some people even think that is the reason why in some instances Swazis who have followed some formal khonta processes at times find themselves victims of evictions because overnight, they get to learn that the land upon which they legally khontaed for and allocated to them is now a titled land owned by a particular landlord and not the chief.

 If indeed this is true it is a tragedy and travesty of justice, more so because the innocent Swazi who had formally and legitimately khontaed becomes the victim of eviction an inhuman and degrading experience, yet they did not encroach into that titled land. In most situations such as these, the land owners choose to label those citizens as squatters who have deliberately encroached into their land and usually opt not to compensate the potential evictees, yet compensation is a constitutionally logical expectation in situations where such evictions are inevitable.

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