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CEDING CONTROL

29/12/2017 00:07:00 By Martin Dlamini

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THE majority of countries around the world may be cursing United States of America’s President Donald Trump for his decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel but Swaziland is loving him for giving over 15 000 jobless textile workers something to wake up to once again.

The textile industry has regained its heartbeat following Swaziland’s readmission as a beneficiary of America’s African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) which opens the door to duty-free access to the US market for products from eligible countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Although we had no business losing AGOA in the first place, this is the sort of news that this country needed, probably even more so than the South African currency needed Cyril Ramaphosa to win the African National Congress (ANC) presidential election.

To think that we caused so much heartache and pain for failing to give workers the rights given to them by the country’s Constitution is regrettable. It raises the question about what we understand about the clauses we put into our national guiding document, particularly the Bill of Rights, which gives freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, etc.

These are the guarantees sought by the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions (SFTU) when it lobbied the American workers federation to put pressure on the US Government to act on Swaziland. After years of unsuccessful engagement with the current government and pressure applied at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the country was subsequently removed as an AGOA beneficiary in January 2015.

Tough decisions have had to be made leading to the country’s re-admission and we must thank everybody who played a part in the process for doing a good job at rekindling hope where hopelessness had taken residence in a vulnerable section of our society that never really had much to live on when it lost its only means of livelihood.

Our poverty level stands at a stubborn 63 per cent, unemployment sits at 27.5 per cent while economic growth is drowning at -0.6 per cent. Attracting foreign direct investment has been a challenge over the years and AGOA offered government the best record of success in this regard, albeit bringing in textile and apparel jobs that are considered very low scale. However, in the absence of anything better, the current celebrations give good indication to the market value of these low paying jobs on the local employment scale today.

The government of the day leaves office in a few months mightily relieved, no doubt, because the suffering experienced by the thousands of textile workers who lost their jobs came under its reign.

However, they will never be able to heal the wounds inflicted on these workers by the loss of AGOA. They remain scars for life.
Next year we head to the polls and a majority new Cabinet is set to run the show. Can we expect anything different? We can only hope that it will build on the new hope for the lower class citizens to engineer a revival of the local economy which is bleeding from mismanagement.
Like our Constitution, the government structures have well documented plans of action, pieces of legislation, polices and guidelines to make this country work very well. The only inadequacy comes in the lack of adherence thereto or lack of implementation.
We take a left turn where the direction arrows point right. Now the country is unable to pay service providers, unable to provide for the sick, incapable of paying elderly grants consistently, feed school children properly, pay doctors overtime or even find the money to pay salaries.
We refuse to put our money where priorities lie, preferring to fund the security forces more than we do agriculture in a peaceful country where thousands of people are starving.
It is for this reason that we embarrassingly have to be told what to do. America has just taught us how to observe our own Constitution and it begs the question; can we still proudly call ourselves a sovereign State?
The reality is that the unions have scored a remarkable victory here and it may just have created an appetite for them to use more of the external means at their disposal in order to get slices of the constitutional cake which government is seemingly reluctant to share.
We don’t want that, never. We are a highly educated nation and certainly lack no skill in the ability to lift this country from this quagmire of self inflicted poverty. We just lack the moral obligation to serve and this we must correct immediately if we are to save the little that’s left of our sovereignty.