Five years since violent protests shattered Eswatini’s calm, King Mswati III has done nothing to address the causes.
In April this year, King Mswati III of Eswatini lavishly celebrated his ruby jubilee, marking 40 years on the throne of sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy. Millions of emalangeni were spent on a big party at the plush new Ezulwini Palazzo Hotel.
Several Southern African presidents and ex-presidents attended, as did Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te (Eswatini is the last African country to recognise Taiwan, rather than China).
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Many businesses, including state-owned enterprises, gave the king generous gifts. Bheki Makhubu, editor of the independent magazine The Nation, told ISS Today, a little wryly perhaps, that: ‘Eswatini is peaceful and quiet; the king just celebrated 40 years on the throne and opened a hotel of Las Vegas standards.’
On the surface, the king appeared to be enjoying unprecedented support from his people, Makhubu noted. However, he also observed that anyone who criticises the king ‘gets ostracised for being disrespectful’ in a society where conformity is growing stronger.
Eswatini’s peace and calm are odd. Nearly half (44.5%) of its people live below the World Bank’s international poverty line of US$3 a day in purchasing power parity terms, and they appear to be growing ever poorer.
Five years ago this month, the same appearance of tranquillity was shattered when countrywide protests evolved into riots and destruction of (mainly government) property. Security forces brutally suppressed the protests, and up to 60 people were killed.
The unprecedented bloodshed jolted the otherwise rather complacent Southern African Development Community (SADC) into action. Diplomatic missions were dispatched to investigate, and Eswatini was placed on the agenda of SADC’s Organ on Politics, Defence and Security. The organ is the local version of the United Nations Security Council, and a place SADC member states don’t like to be.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa travelled to Eswatini in November 2021 and reported that Mswati had agreed to hold a national dialogue, though the terms remained to be negotiated. SADC later said it wanted a full political dialogue (as demanded by Eswatini’s political opposition).
After much stalling, Mswati instead called his people to Sibaya, a traditional gathering in the royal kraal, in July 2023, and announced that elections would be held in September. After the elections, another Sibaya was convened in October, but the king announced there would be no political dialogue. Both gatherings were de facto monologues by the monarch; no participants were allowed to speak, make submissions or respond.
SADC appeared to lose interest in the matter, and in August 2024, formally removed Eswatini from its agenda.
In January 2023, Thulani Maseko, the human rights lawyer and political activist who had led the campaign for a national dialogue and articulated its demands as head of the Multi-Stakeholder Forum (MSF), was shot dead in his house in Mbabane. The effective political opposition to the monarchy seemed to die with him.
Human rights lawyer Sibusiso Nhlabatsi told ISS Today that the appearance of peaceful tranquillity was ‘overwhelmingly deceptive’ and was really ‘enforced silence.’
‘After 2021, the state responded not with reform but with repression, the jailing of two former Members of Parliament, the assassination of [Maseko], militarised policing and the weaponisation of the Suppression of Terrorism Act to target political dissidents.
‘People have not stopped being discontented; they have simply learnt that open dissent carries a mortal price. The grievances of 2021 – service delivery, poverty, unemployment, exclusion from plural political participation – remain entirely unaddressed and continue to flow beneath the surface.’
He said Mswati had done ‘nothing of substance’ to address these grievances. ‘There has been no dialogue and there will never be dialogue. I think that chapter is closed.’
And Mswati was being abetted in his supreme power, in effect, by a demoralised opposition. ‘The assassination of Thulani was a decapitation strike on the MSF, and it has never recovered its convening power,’ said Nhlabatsi. ‘The democratic opposition today is fragmented, exhausted and operating under fear. I daresay the democratic forces are dead now.’
He said the media were essentially promoting the monarchy. Another Eswatini source told ISS Today that the media’s quiescence was greatly abetted by Michelo Shakantu’s recent purchase of the country’s main newspaper, The Times. Shakantu is a wealthy Zambian businessman who wins many government contracts and is married to Eswatini’s foreign minister.
Nhlabatsi observed that academics and researchers had also, ‘with a handful of exceptions, retreated into silence. Institutional dependence on the state and the memory of what happened to outspoken voices have a chilling effect. Accountability work has been left to a small, exposed band of lawyers, activists and citizen journalists.’
Melusi Simelane of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre in Johannesburg has written that while the Swazi elite is prospering, ordinary citizens are not ‘better off, freer, healthier, more educated or more secure than they were in 1986, when the monarch took office at 18.’
He describes ‘a wealth fund captured by the few; a university starved of funding while its students are criminalised’ and patients denied basic medicines for 10 months in 2024 because the sole official authorised to sign for them had been fired and not replaced.
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‘The millions that were spent on celebrating could have funded the scholarships that were cut, the medicines that were unavailable, and the legal aid that was withheld.’ The king’s 40th anniversary was ‘not a celebration of the Swazi people. It is a demand that they applaud the conditions of their own subjugation.’
Nhlabatsi did not believe this situation could continue indefinitely without further disturbance, because the structural drivers of the 2021 unrest were still intact – the youth unemployment crisis, deepening inequality and a discredited political system.
‘A system that closes every constitutional avenue for change is storing pressure, not driving it away. The calm is conditional, and the conditions are deteriorating.’
As he noted, no one predicted the upheaval of 2021 – and so no one could predict if or when it might recur.
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Peter Fabricius, Consultant, ISS Pretoria
