VERY COSTLY RUBBER STAMP!

One has to ask what the value of Parliament in Eswatini is. Is it worth all the hype?

Can we expect our honourables to fix the social and economic problems that currently plague the Kingdom of Eswatini? It has become quite obvious that securing a seat in our Parliament is as good as a lotto win to a five-year guaranteed half a million Emalangeni annual salary without having to lift a finger to do an honest day’s work. I mean, we vote for people just so they can walk on top of us with well above average salaries, guaranteed access to loans, and with the social clout to endeavour in five-year personal projects that will uplift their families and immediate networks of beneficiaries. What happens to the rest of us in the process?

What we are guaranteed from our MPs in their five-year tenure, as they milk the system to enrich their personal lives, is a list of circulars, new taxes, and more pressure on the rest of us to shell out more money to keep the status quo intact. Let’s get some perspective people: Parliament is an E180 million cost to the wallet just so our honourables can pretend to be enacting laws/policies for the benefit of the country as a whole. About 73 per cent (E132 million) of the E180 million goes to personnel costs, that is, money simply being paid to our MPs so that they can keep seats warm in our precious Parliament.

Really, this is a very expensive rubber stamp, especially if you consider that government only allocated E190 million in the 2018/19 financial year for the education fund for orphaned and disadvantaged children. Again, for your information, government in the same period has allocated only E8.7 million for grants for people with disabilities; E338 million for our struggling University of Eswatini; and only E419 million on grants for aging persons. There are 59 elected MPs and maybe less than 200 people in total sharing the E132 million allocated to Parliament salaries compared to how many thousands of elderly people sharing the meagre E419 million! The masses share peanuts, while our MPs perpetually lobby for more sitting allowances just so their annual pay cheques can hit the million Emalangeni mark. It’s an easy jackpot.

Besides funding for the forces, our Parliament is quite up the ladder in terms of government recurrent expenditure for the various government ministries, parastatals, departments, and units. The Ministry of Natural Resources and Energy has to make do with E85 million, while the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Trade, which has an important task to spur business activities in the country, only gets E132 million of government’s budget allocation.That is 73 per cent of what Parliament gets. Another sister to our Parliament is the Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC), which has an E142 million claim on the wallet in 2018/19 government recurrent expenditure.

Now that the elections process is over, do you think the E142 million produced a stellar and fair voting process for the nation? Aspiring MPs are crying foul, left, right and centre because of allegations of corruption and old geezers buying votes to secure their cushy seats in Parliament for the next five years. For the money government spends on Parliament, we deserve much more sophisticated policy and law making in this country for the benefit of all emaSwati. Ask yourselves this: in the past five years, what changes in economic/development policy has Parliament made to make our lives better in Eswatini?

In the past five years, since time immemorial, we have witnessed an ever increasing cost-of-living in Eswatini, a cut on budgets for social services, and a loss of the few guarantees we used to enjoy as a nation (such as tertiary scholarships and a decent and affordable health sector), while the legislators and government administrators on top have maintained a very good standard of living compared to the rest of us. When it comes to real issues and protecting emaSwati from the gluttony of our legislators and their economic system, our MPs simply have no say and no bite on effecting real changes in the poverty economics of the greater masses, where you find the rest of us. They are just an expensive rubber stamp that taxpayers have to keep buying at an inflated cost every five years. It is all an expensive and unnecessary farce!

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