ON THE CUSP OF FIRST WORLD STATUS

THE Sovereign, His Majesty King Mswati III and Ingwenyama, will on Friday deliver the last State Of the Nation Address (SONA) during the State opening of Parliament before the Kingdom of Eswatini transits from Third to First World status in 2022, which is about 10 months away. This makes this occasion momentous in many dimensions not least that for the first time the State opening of Parliament will be virtual - courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic - which should not be surprising even for a nation with a penchant for holding on to irreverent practices of the dark ages in this the 21st century age of algorithms and robotics. 

Transition

It is for this singular reason that Vision 2022, which embodies the transition to First World status for the kingdom, is likely to get a mention in the SONA. And ah, yes, the self-same novel coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 conspired to slow, if not derail, the national progression and quantum leap into a new world could be valid reasoning in the event of shortcomings. But what is that common thread that knits us together as a collective and a cohesive force we, emaSwati, identify with and shall rally around in unison to affirm that this is our country and its inhabitants have arrived to the promised First World destination. What is it that we can all point out as significant achievements that qualify this country to join and be welcomed into the league of First World countries? 

To put matters in perspective, we ought to reflect that Vision 2022 was birthed 25 years ago in 1997 when emaSwati from diverse backgrounds – from ultra-conservative traditional leaders (chiefs) to progressive trade unionists who were/are largely proponents of multiparty democracy, professionals, non-governmental organisations to government apparatchiks – put their heads together in a nation building exercise and by so doing disproving and nullifying the theory that political and social pluralism and diversity was divisive and counter to national cohesion by producing the National Development Strategy (NDS).  

Dream

Embodied by the NDS was a 25-year dream, Vision 2022, in which emaSwati in their diversity set themselves the goal of making this the Kingdom of Eswatini – then formally known as the Kingdom of Swaziland – one of the top 10 developing nations in the world. The NDS was, and is, coherent how this was to be achieved in terms of comprehensive action plans and developmental projects to be undertaken as well as how this 25-year journey was to be benchmarked. But this group of wise men and women who are the authors of the NDS were not blind to the apparently hostile political environment they identified as a stumbling block and, therefore, not conducive to its practical implementation and success. The key to unlocking the country’s potential, the NDS authors reasoned and agreed, was in political reformation of the kingdom’s body politic. 

As I see it, the very suggestion that the NDS could only be unlocked by political reforms was its very undoing. Political reforms were not going to happen and have not happened to date. While at the time a constitutional review commission (CRC) was in place and could easily have assimilated the NDS yet, for obvious reasons, did not. Instead the CRC chose to entrench the same political system in which all power - Executive, Judiciary and Legislative - is vested with the Monarchy, an antithesis to the creation of a modern vibrant economic environment capable of attracting investors that was, and is, the lodestar to achieving Vision 2022. Consequently the NDS was consigned to the dustbin and its vision of making Eswatini one of the top ten developing countries by 2022 was tweaked and the goal of Vision 2022 became that of transforming eSwatini into a First World country, a quantum leap from the original objective yet seemingly and magically achievable within the same timeframe.

Adopted

Ironically in the intervening period between 1997 when the NDS was adopted and today, on the eve of the final push to the promised First World, not much has changed just in about every facet of the typical life of an ordinary liSwati. Poverty has deepened among the majority of emaSwati privately referred to as timfucuta (debris) by the high and mighty while government is looking the other way and pouring billions of the taxpayer’s Emalangeni into projects of no economic value as well as in financing the First World lifestyle of the political elites. EmaSwati still have to live with a dysfunctional, irrelevant and increasingly unaffordable education system. Land tenure remains a controversial issue in the absence of a coherent policy. 

Unemployment, especially among the country’s youth including tertiary graduates, is on the ascendancy. Even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic people are forced to inhabit overcrowded queues overnight to access government services some of which, such as healthcare with its perennial shortages of drugs and personnel, are non-existent. The country’s road infrastructure network has all but disintegrated. The list is long!

And when all is said and done, the questions remain in respect of the meaning and import of First World status to the ordinary liSwati and whether or not it is the country that is cynosure in all of this. Your guess is as good as mine!

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