GOVT NOT CANDID ON NATIONAL DIALOGUE

If it were in the league of criminal enterprises, this the Kingdom of Eswatini would, owing to government’s inherent reckless and care-less streak, still come up short from taking pole position if a cursory glance at the auditor general’s report for the last financial year is anything to go by.

From diversion of funds allocated for the funeral of the late former Prime Minister, Ambrose Mandvulo Dlamini, to the payment of half a million Emalangeni to an imaginary company – all courtesy of the Cabinet Office – to the disappearing E338 million from the Guardian Fund under the custodianship of the Master’s Office – a wing of the untouchable Judiciary - to the King Mswati III International Airport bleeding the taxpayer of a cool E1.6 billion, oh the list of criminal waste of the taxpayer’s Emalangeni is never ending.

Obtaining

For the umpteenth time, government excesses licenced by the obtaining polity have been laid bare before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) where presiding officers have to swallow the bullet to protect their political principals who apparently are not accountable to the people. However, offences largely go unpunished and even if they are, it is more symbolic than punitive to deter future transgressions. And listing all the transgressions, which vary from overspending to diversion of budgets and to throwing money at problems with the hope of wishing them away to wasting money on ill-informed and ill-conceived so-called First World projects of no economic value whatsoever, would most probably consume more than the centimetre columns allocated for this column. In any event, even if this could be accomplished but it would not cure the ailment of cognitive dissonance afflicting government and the leadership whenever confronted by naked facts because the truth is not currency to and a forte of the obtaining polity.

Throughout all this milieu the people are denied the right to change and install a government of their choice owing to the dysfunctional Tinkhundla political system whose only claim to fame is the election, on so-called individual merit, of lawmakers whose function is to rubber stamp decisions taken elsewhere. Hence the recurring theme of damning resource wastages and reckless spending year-in-and-year-out that are now legend in the auditor general’s (AG) annual report that the PAC have to routinely deal with annually. But the rot never stops!

Failures

As I see it, it is this cocktail of failures, imprudent and reckless management of the fiscus whose sum total is mis-governance that triggered last year’s civil unrest after government had banned people from expressing their angst against the system through petitioning their Members of Parliament. In response, government unleashed brutal force culminating in the deaths of yet an unconfirmed number of casualties that a cursory finding by the Human Rights Commission put at 46 dead. To date government has neglected and/or refused to sanction a formal investigation. In the wake of last year’s revolt against the obtaining political hegemony, it has become apparent that efforts are afoot by the leadership to conjure up strategies in the name of national dialogue to further entrench this failed political experiment. That the retention of the system will perpetuate the waste and mismanagement of resources leading to mis-governance that birthed poverty, disease, wide scale youth unemployment and all the social ills facing Eswatini society today, is of no concern for as long as the system serves the personal desires of those in power.

As I see it, the lack of appetite for a constructive national dialogue by the leadership is evident in the manner they are approaching this subject that has brought back to life the once famous old slogan of ‘there’s no hurry in Swaziland’. There is further apparent indignation and defensiveness towards the involvement of external interventions, such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) even as it emerges that it had served government with the terms of reference for the national dialogue. But government has kept this information to itself, yet another indicator that it is not enthusiastic about the national dialogue.

This explains Housing and Urban Development Minister Prince Simelane’s unsolicited pronouncement that outsiders would be welcomed only as observers as opposed to facilitators and mediators in the national dialogue. In other words, government is claiming exclusive ownership of the process and would roll it out only on its terms to the exclusion of the other stakeholders. This can only mean that government is planning to convene the run-of-the-mill usual talk-shop Sibaya where people merely let off steam (ngulabatihhamula khona) instead of influencing policy and the national trajectory apropos national imperatives and priorities. It has not dawned that there have been paradigm shifts on many fronts, and in particular, how the State intercourses with the people in the wake of dozens of emaSwati being martyred in the heat of last year’s civil unrest.

Now it can be stated with some measure of authority that government’s snail paced approach to the national dialogue is a tacit rejection to political transformation and, specifically, to embracing the idea of a pluralistic body politic. Consequently, it is planning to go ahead with parliamentary elections next year, still under the auspices of the Tinkhundla Political System. That on its own nullifies the slated national dialogue as a path finder to a new all-embracing political dispensation. Consequently, this makes the mooted national dialogue a non-event that, if it eventually happens, would not impact the kingdom’s body politic and, therefore, would be nothing further than a white wash to create the false façade that the retention of the political status quo was a decision of the people other than an imposition from above as it happened when it was decreed as an experiment decades earlier.           

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