We are a country guided by laws

Sir,

It is probably only in Swaziland where leaders proudly offer threats and counter threats as the selling point of their remaining to power.

We see more threats as people jostle for relevance in their pursuit for power. Worries about who becomes who or what in the 2013 elections appears more important than what happens to the country.

We are again seeing the damaging threats that make the vulnerable people look stupid. Always remote controlled. Swaziland must protect itself from these people and from these threats. The responsibility lies with aspiring leaders and those who have risen to such prominence.
Every Swazi has a right to vote and contend for power within the laws of the contest. Every Swazi has rights to enter legitimate alliances to access power.

The constitutional provisions on freedom of association permit it. What we must avoid is being consumed about leading Swaziland that we threaten to set the country on fire. We are a country guided by laws. Those who aspire to lead and their supporters must eschew threats in their ambition to stay in power.

Yes poverty among our leaders breeds contempt for honesty. After all, a hungry man does not assimilate the sermon. Most of our leaders who are from pauperised pedigree had been fed to the tip of their lips, the desperate injury inflicted on their psyche by penury continues to haunt them like a nightmare and this results in desperation to maintain their present fiscal positions. If not why don’t they give up and let others rule?

 We as a nation are mindful of the temperament of our leaders to acts of dishonesty. The world may not understand us, but we know that most of our leaders lie about virtually everything and disregard the truth even in most simple situations where facts are obvious.
 We really need to be rescued from the 18th Century rule we are forced to live in at the moment. Do we need these unending, meaningless, uninspiring, depressing, discouraging, disturbing and provocative messages from our leaders?

Our future is not about elections in the sense politicians see them. Elections are useful as part of the quest for democratic governance. The democratic importance of elections is overemphasised where the people play minimal roles in them. What is important always is what people want to make of their country. Elections cannot change our people, not the way politicians use them.

Expanding

Rarely do we hear politicians espousing their ideas about the future of Swaziland and expanding their energies in ensuring that their dream Swaziland is realised. Power is everything and everything a politician wants. He gets it first before thinking of what he would do with it. Disruptive as this attitude is, it is enlightening to the extent that most of them do nothing other than engaging in schemes to hold onto power for which for them is an end in itself.

Their entire concern is elections, the struggle for power, the decisions about who becomes who and those marked for nothingness. The reduction of the country to this contracted vision is the biggest failure of the system since independence. Every politician sees election to office as the platform to perpetrate either itself or its interest in power.

Swaziland has failed woefully at big issues of nationhood. It also fails sadly on the small things. Then ask yourself this question, who will walk and work to restore the dignity of Swaziland? How democratic is Tinkhundla when it comes to such things?

Colleen Matsebula

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