Forty years of Mswati rule offer zilch to celebrate

In the coming days, the last absolute monarch in sub-Saharan Africa, King Mswati III of the Kingdom of Eswatini will celebrate 40 years on the throne and millions of emalangeni (the Swazi lilangeni, SZL, pegged 1:1 to the South African rand, ZAR) are expected to be spent. Dignitaries are expected to attend, with gifts already presented to the monarch at his Lozitha Palace. The state machinery is already working overtime to convince the nation and the watching world that there is something worth celebrating.

There have been genuine achievements over these four decades: modest infrastructure has expanded, bilateral relations with Taiwan have benefited from increased agricultural expertise and pockets of the economy have grown. These are real achievements that should not be overlooked. However, an honest accounting of the 40-year reign ought to look beyond the ceremonial and ask real questions about governance, including whether most citizens are better off, freer, healthier, more educated or more secure than they were in 1986, when the monarch took office at 18. If, on almost every meaningful measure, the answer is troubling, then what follows should not be seen as an attack on the person of the monarch but rather as an indictment of a governance system that has consistently chosen power over people.

An economy that works for the few

Eswatini’s economy tells a tale of two worlds, depending on who narrates it. At the very top, a narrow elite of businesspeople and politicians within the monarch’s inner circle controls most of the country’s wealth, while at the bottom, over 60% of the population lives below the poverty line. These are not the natural outcomes of a small, landlocked country with limited resources; they are the predictable results of a deliberate policy environment that has persisted for the past four decades.

Chief among these policy decisions is the treatment of Tibiyo Taka Ngwane, a sovereign wealth fund established in 1968 by the former monarch, King Sobhuza II. In its founding vision, the fund was intended to hold shares in the country’s major industries in trust for the Swazi nation, forming a genuine social security architecture built on the country’s productive assets. Four decades later, that vision has been quietly hollowed out. The fund operates without parliamentary scrutiny, pays no tax and its benefits accrue not to a broad citizenry but to those at the very top of the political hierarchy. The late Mario Masuku, one of the country’s most enduring advocates for democracy, once described it as a “feedlot for the king and his inner circle.” What could have been the foundation of a genuine social security net, shielding ordinary Swazis from poverty and unemployment, instead became a vehicle for elite accumulation.

This pattern of monopolisation spans the economy, with major industries such as sugarcane farming, construction, media, and telecommunications dominated by entities closely tied to the ruling elites and their cronies. In the Lubombo region – the heart of Eswatini’s sugar belt and one of the country’s most significant sources of export revenue – this dynamic is most stark. Sugarcane has long been described as ‘Swazi gold’, yet the benefits of this gold elude the small farmers who live and work the land around the big corporations in the region.

The dual land tenure system, inherited from colonialism and never meaningfully reformed, divides the country between commercially productive Title Deed Land (TDL), where large-scale sugarcane, citrus and timber operations flourish, and the Swazi Nation Land (SNL), where the majority of the population attempts subsistence farming on plots allocated by chiefs, with no title, no security and often no realistic path to commercial agriculture. One farmer in Lubombo told international researchers that she could not even afford a tractor, let alone the joining fees and documentation required to join a sugar cooperative.

This is not an accident. The IMF has repeatedly recommended land tenure reform as a structural solution to Eswatini’s deepening economic inequality. The government has consistently declined to act because a system in which all SNL is held in trust by the monarch and allocated through chiefs who are instruments of royal authority is also a system of political control. In Eswatini, land is not merely an economic resource; it is a political tool of governance and power. Reforming tenure would redistribute power.

Equally, trade unions, which should provide workers with the only meaningful counterweight to this concentration of economic power, have been consistently suppressed. While unions are formally permitted, obtaining and retaining legal status is deliberately made onerous and union leaders have repeatedly been targeted under the country’s broad sedition and terrorism laws. The environment for workers’ rights has never been allowed to develop into a genuine check on employers or the state.

An education system left to wither

No institution has suffered more from deliberate underfunding than the University of Eswatini, once the country’s flagship institution of higher learning and a producer of some of southern Africa’s most distinguished public figures, including South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe, former prime minister of Lesotho Pakalitha Mosisili and many others. Industry experts who have assessed the institution in recent years have described it in bleak terms and it now receives about a third of its budget request from the government to run its operations for an about 7 000-student body. Government scholarship coverage, once universal for qualifying students, has been systematically reduced since the 2008 global financial crisis and the decline has been steep, leaving thousands of young Swazis unable to afford tertiary education. The consequences have been predictable and devastating.

When the government fails to pay stipends to sponsored students, as it has repeatedly, students with no other means of support are left without food and other basic necessities. When student representative bodies negotiate and those negotiations fail, protest follows. And when protest follows, the state’s response has never been to address the underlying failure but to criminalise the students. Presidents of the Swaziland National Union of Students have been arrested under terrorism and sedition laws, assaulted by police, expelled from universities, denied the right to leave the country and had their scholarships withdrawn. One former student leader described being unable to study, unable to work, unable to travel and facing 25 years in prison not for any act of violence but for leading a student movement. As recently as 2024, a 26-year-old student activist was charged under the Suppression of Terrorism Act and held in arbitrary detention for over two years without a fair trial.

There is a particularly troubling dimension to the question of the curriculum in this context. The recent halt to funding for humanities studies is not a bureaucratic technicality; it is, whether intentional or not, an attack on the foundations of critical thinking. A Bachelor of Arts in humanities studies includes courses such as English, geography, history, religious studies and African languages, which teach students to inhabit perspectives other than their own, to question received wisdom and to recognise the difference between a story they are told and the reality they live. A government that criminalises political dissent has an obvious interest in young people who do not study these courses that advance critical thinking. It is also worth noting that the constitutional promise of free primary education was only realised after civil society and lawyers took the state to court and won. Political will to educate the nation’s children, it turns out, required a court order.

Healthcare: a system corroded from within

The public healthcare system is another story of chronic underfunding, compounded by acute mismanagement, resulting in shortages or stockouts of lifesaving drugs. However, the 2024 scandal illustrated the system’s fragility with unusual clarity. Following the suspension of a senior official at Swazi Pharm, the government’s primary pharmaceutical supplier, it emerged that she had been the sole authorised signatory for import permits for controlled medicines. When she was removed, no one was appointed to replace her. For ten months, from February to November 2024, the country had no government official authorised to sign import permits for critical medicines, including morphine, fentanyl, phenobarbital and haloperidol. Patients requiring pain management and psychiatric care went without treatment.

Meanwhile, Swazi Med, Eswatini’s largest medical aid scheme and a lifeline for middle-class families, has been mired in a governance crisis, with reserves collapsing and South African medical facilities reportedly turning away its members. Private healthcare expands to fill gaps that public healthcare cannot but it is accessible only to those with steady incomes and medical aid cover. For the majority of Swazis who have neither, the erosion of public health is not a policy inconvenience; it is a death sentence deferred.

Democracy deferred: a fifty-year wait

The formal suppression of political pluralism in Eswatini predates the current reign. In April 1973, King Sobhuza II suspended the independence constitution and banned all political parties. That decree has never been repealed. The 2005 constitution guarantees freedom of association, yet political parties remain excluded from electoral participation. The Tinkhundla system is far from democratic. It is an administrative architecture of absolute power, dressed in the language of participatory governance.

The cost of challenging this system has been paid in years of imprisonment, exile and blood. Mario Masuku, Jan Sithole, and Thulani Maseko are among those who have suffered under it. Maseko, a brilliant and courageous human rights lawyer, was shot dead in his home in front of his family in January 2023. His killers have not been brought to justice. A credible investigation has never been conducted.

The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision to uphold the Sedition and Subversive Activities Act confirms how archaic law is weaponised to silence dissent. Sedition laws of this kind are fundamentally incompatible with the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Human rights: the full toll

Forty years of concentrated, unaccountable power have produced predictable results across every domain of human rights. Prisons are overcrowded, press freedom is effectively non-existent and civil society faces constant harassment. The refusal to register Eswatini Sexual and Gender Minorities (ESGM), the organisation I founded, is emblematic of deliberate exclusion.

What is there to celebrate?

Eswatini is a small, resilient, and culturally rich nation. Its people have endured extraordinary pressure. But on governance, the record is one of systemic failure: captured wealth, underfunded education, a collapsing health system and a democracy denied.

There is always something to celebrate in survival. But celebration of this governance record is not a celebration of the Swazi people. It is a demand that they applaud the conditions of their own subjugation. That is not a demand they should be expected to meet.

Melusi Simelane is the founder and board chairperson of Eswatini Sexual and Gender Minorities (ESGM), a civic rights programme manager at Southern Africa Litigation Centre and an MA International Relations Student at the University of Sussex.

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