ESWATINI LAND QUESTION CONUNDRUM PART 2

 The complexity of the matter is further exacerbated by the possibility of other countries, such as Lesotho and Botswana, also claiming a piece of South Africa.

In Lesotho a group calling itself ‘Basotho Petitioners’ has already written to the British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, to facilitate the return of land taken from them in 1854.

That is not all; active and dormant kingdoms within South Africa itself may rise, demanding not just land but sovereignty as recently threatened by Zulu monarch, King Goodwill Zwelithini when voicing out his opposition to the State’s expropriation of land without compensation in an apparent protection of his Ingonyama Trust, which administers traditional land in KwaZulu-Natal.

Maintaning peace among neighbours

Thus the best outcome the Kingdom of Eswatini could ever wish for is in the form of reparations and levies on mineral resources being exploited on all the land in question and nothing more. That way the peace and equilibrium existing between emaSwati on either side of the border could be maintained.

As it were the matter of the expropriation of land without compensation in South Africa has also brought into scrutiny control of land under traditional leaders, a subject that has resonance in this the Kingdom of Eswatini.
Prior to the South African Parliament passing the motion for the State to expropriate land without compensation, that country’s government commissioned a high-level panel under the chairmanship of former President Kgalema Motlanthe to investigate land ownership and administration in tribal areas in KwaZulu-Natal.

The panel was scathing in its report, concluding that traditional leaders were village tin-pot dictators who used land to exploit and control the people.
Does that sound familiar?

Here in Eswatini the question of land tenure has still not been settled 50 years after independence. EmaSwati still have no right to a square metre of land in what they call their country.
Land is held in trust for emaSwati because they remain in a permanent state of infancy that reduces them into land tenants. Consequently, the leadership uses land to whip people into socio-political conformity. Ask any former legislator who has spoken ill of the political system obtaining in the kingdom.

The traditional leadership routinely harangues and terrorises the parents, those who still have, or families of the dissenting lawmakers with threats of evictions and demolitions of their homes.
Why, even title deed land in urban and peri-urban as well as farms can be expropriated extra-judiciary at the whims of the leadership. In short, citizens remain serfs in what essentially is a fiefdom.
Sometime in the 1990s an attempt was made to normalise land ownership and to end the permanent state of land tenancy by the citizens that obtains to this day so that the people enjoyed security of tenure.
However, this was aborted on the 11th hour ostensibly because this did not sit well with the leadership.

Thus the people’s freedom to own land in what they call their country remains a mirage. In the event, people cannot use communal land administered under indigenous and customary law as surety to secure finances in order to advance their lifestyles and economic well-being.

Still not self-sufficient
half a century later

Is it any wonder, therefore, that this country has, after half a century of independence, still not self-sufficient in its staple diet maize while productive farms held in trust lie fallow.
Yet the departing British protectors had, on the eve of independence in 1968, created a fund to assist government to purchase farms owned by Europeans to give back to the indigenous people. But instead of giving land to the people government chose to retain ownership of these farms while others are held in trust and remain unproductive.

Under the circumstances, the question has to be asked what the value of independence is when the people have no right to own a square metre of communal land that is commonly referred to as Swati Nation Land.
Instead the leadership uses land to blackmail and whip the people into conformity and thus remain in a permanent state of infancy and unable to freely determine their destiny.
Yet South Africa, exactly 24 years after independence, has already taken giant strides in addressing the question of land tenure and ownership. So, what is the independence dividend for the Kingdom of Eswatini if it is not freehold land ownership by the people?    



        

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