CULTURE: SWAZILAND: The Ever Powerful Swazi Chiefs

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MBABANE, Apr 21 2000 (IPS) - Swaziland’s chieftaincy system, the bedrock on which the tradition-minded Southern African nation is founded, is growing stronger with age.

While chiefs in other countries in Africa have been marginalised in the wake of democratic political systems, and now serve largely honourary functions, Swazi chiefs had their powers vastly increased with a Swaziland Administration Order decreed by King Mswati last year.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch by-passed parliament, and caught the media and pro-democracy groups by surprise, when he gave the 300 chiefs, he personally appoints, the power to try cases and evict troublesome subjects.

This year, chiefs want the power to arrest people. Justice Minister Maweni Simelane, who is himself a chief, is inclined to champion this request. Simelane stunned human rights groups last year by fast-tracking the Administrative Order at the king’s bequest.

“Chiefs have always had the power to try cases,” said Minister Simelane. “The administrative order merely codified this traditional power.”

Dr Joshua Mzizi, president of the Human Rights Organisation of Swaziland (HUMARAS), disagrees.

“Traditionally, chiefs have never been judges. They lead a band of area elders to listen to disputes, and a consensus is reached between rival parties. The system worked because justice was seen to be done, so that even the losing party respected the decision in the name of community harmony.

“The matters considered were strictly local, like land disputes, accusations of witchcraft, and wandering livestock that harm someone’s crops. These were not criminal cases,” he said.

Last year’s Administrative Order gave chiefs the power to try all crimes, except capital offenses like murder. The Swaziland Law Society issued a statement honouring the esteemed position of chiefs, but it deplored the use of chiefs as magistrates for violations of statutory crimes the attorneys felt were best handled by the nation’s courts.

“In addition to the court system, there is a complementary system of national courts that handle small cases on Swazi National Land, where most Swazis live,” says attorney Fikile Mtembu.

“In these and the chiefs’ councils rural problems were handled. Now urban crimes are encroaching into the countryside.”

Mtembu feels the king’s order to give chiefs broad judicial powers was an admission that the overextended and underfunded Royal Swaziland Police Force could not cope with expanding crime.

The Law Society contends that chiefs are not trained in law, that many are illiterate, and their rulings will be based on prejudice and whim rather than legal precedent and the letter of the law.

The trend to grant Swazi chiefs greater power and influence accelerated this week when Senators in parliament suggested that chiefs be given monthly salaries, and chauffeurs.

Few Swazi chiefs own cars, and despite the prestige of their positions, none are rich men. They are given stipends by the national treasury, but not salaries, and community members pay their allegiance to chiefs by weeding and harvesting their fields, and constructing the traditional mud and thatch huts usually found at chiefs’ homesteads.

The Senate passed a motion directing government to grant chiefs additional benefits, though a proposal to give each chief a cellphone was dropped because most rural areas do not yet have access to the cellular network.

Human rights groups like HUMARAS and the Swaziland Democratic Movement are troubled by the potential for human rights violations if chiefs use their expanding powers for political ends.

Political parties are banned in Swaziland, and several underground parties have issued manifestos calling for democracy, and the relegation of King Mswati to a symbolic cultural role.

“Chiefs know that as goes the king, so go the chiefs,” says newspaper political commentator Ackel Zwane. “They see democracy as an anti-Swazi Western conspiracy because it jeopardises their positions. These positions have never been subject to popular vote.”

In the past 10 years, some chiefs have threatened to evict whole families from their ancestral lands because a family member was known to belong to a banned political party. No evictions were executed, but Zwane says Swaziland’s progressives see that the power and thus an effective threat is there.

The call to give chiefs the power to arrest suspects was raised in parliament by Senator Mkhumbi Dlamini, who is also a chief.

His motion was motivated by environmental rather than criminal or political concerns. Noting that parts of the country are being stripped of indigenous trees to be used for firewood, leaving the land vulnerable to encroaching desertification, Dlamini felt “chiefs are close to the people, and it would be easy for them to stop someone found to be tampering with nature.”

Clement Dlamini of the environmental group Green Cross agrees. “What the chief says makes a lot of sense. There is no law enforcement agency that has the interest or resources to stop illegal harvesting of endangered flora. Chiefs should be able to detain people until the police arrive, or try them in community courts, before the wilderness has been irreparably damaged.”

This specific usage of detention powers for chiefs has supporters. But civil libertarians like HUMARAS fear that if chiefs are given additional powers of arrest for environmental violations, and then they try those defendants, the precedent will lead to further arrests of other suspects for other reasons.

Dr. Mzizi also finds it odd that with the Constitutional Commission due to release its preliminary recommendations for new national governing document, chiefs’ powers and jurisprudence changes are being decreed by royal fiat.

“These are things that should be dealt with in a constitution, to suit all the people,” says Mzizi.