WHO WILL RESCUE THE KINGDOM FROM ABYSS?

ANYONE who thinks the in-coming government will resolve the myriad of problems facing the Kingdom of Eswatini – which include a cash-flow crisis that has become chronic, institutional corruption that is putting foreign direct investment to flight, moral decay, etc. – is either from the phalanx of freeloading sycophants, bootlickers and praise singers or need to have themselves admitted at the psychiatric centre immediately.

Save for new and recycled faces, to whom umgcwembe (traditional Swati dish/bowl) would be passed on as the cyclical feeding frenzy begins anew, nothing much would change in the manner this country is (mis)governed.

The rot will continue unabated; worsening state of the health and education sectors; refusal to prioritise food production by properly allocating resourses coupled with freeing up land through enacting an open and transparent land tenure policy; continued wastages on vanity projects of no foreseeable economic value and benefit to the nation in the furtherance of the ill-defined First World dream; unchecked spending on the army as if we are in a perennial state of war; continued exploitation of mineral resources with no benefit accruing to the nation and increasingly unsustainable runaway expenditure on ceremonies, the list is endless.

As I see it, hoping that the new faces in government will bring a new dawn that will take the country on a different trajectory of hope and development, is like hoping that those responsible for stealing from and impoverishing the nation will repatriate the loot from their offshore depositories. No, the season of looting will continue unabated simply because not much will have fundamentally changed apropos Swati polity and its inherent propensity for moral degeneration. Just like before, the usefulness of the new faces in government is that of carrying out errands as opposed to making decisions, while earning obscene salaries for such menial tasks that require no special skills whatsoever. 

Recently I had sight of a newspaper article about India rolling out a health insurance programme that will cover 500 million – that is half a billion -  people that jolted me into the reality and scale of the failure of the obtaining political system. Here in the Kingdom of Eswatini government has dismally failed to provide basic health services to just 1.2 million inhabitants in a country that is the size of a village, comparatively speaking, but awash with resources.

 
And after a whole 50 years of independence we still cannot feed ourselves our staple diet, maize, because of poor planning owing to the overconcentration of power in one centre post-1973 King’s Proclamation to the nation that just about emasculated emaSwati of all their faculties; the people were outlawed from speaking out on how they were governed or about issues affecting them and; the people were also outlawed from thinking. To ensure compliance, an army was created and some of the most draconian laws, such as the renewable 60-Day Detention Order, were imported and customised from the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Consequently, some of the most fertile lands instead of being reserved and utilised as the nation’s food basket, such as the valley stretching from Mvutshini southward down to Ntondozi and westward towards Bhunya and others elsewhere, were allowed to host homesteads, and farms acquired through the Lifa Fund set up through funds from the British to purchase land owned by expatriates for the benefit of emaSwati were retained by government. As it were, we should be a net exporter of food given the size of the population in relation to productive land that should have been employed for this purpose had thinking not become an exclusive preserve of a minority. Yet we are expected to be singing praises and for what exactly, one might ask.

The questions that we ought to sober up to because they could well manifest into reality in the not too distant future should the government remain recalcitrant and continue to deny the people their basic human rights as enshrined in the Bill of Rights of the national constitution; what would happen were South Africa to end the apartheid largesse in the form of the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU)?; what would happen if South Africa were to abolish the pegging of the Lilangeni to the Rand? Would the phalanx of sycophants, bootlickers and praise singers continue to denigrate South Africa’s multiparty democratic system or they would be seeking refuge elsewhere? These are all grim possibilities that cannot be ruled out completely given the circumstances of the kingdom’s governance.

As I see it, the flip side of the current Kingdom of Eswatini that is mired in poverty, economic meltdown, institutional corruption, moral decay, etc., is an oyster that would be the envy of other nations; epitome of success politically (fully and participatory democracy and the people reaping the fruits of the full enjoyment of human rights as God meant it to be), socially and economically (resources, in particular minerals, shared equitably and employed for the benefit of all emaSwati and adequate investments in agriculture, education and health).

Yes, this Utopia is feasible as underscored by the real and scientific classification of the kingdom as a medium income country by the United Nations (UN).  That the kingdom today ranks amongst poverty stricken nations of the world is owed to mis-governance and bad leadership. Given its attributes, which include (small) physical size of the country, a small and manageable (largely homogeneous) population, high literacy rate and abundant mineral resources – the basis upon which the UN scientifically derived the medium income status – this country could have been, indeed, the Switzerland of Africa, if not more.  But now we have to deal with the question of who will rescue this country from the slipping deeper into political, social and economic abyss?  

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