By James Hall
MAPUTO, Sep 5 2009 (IPS)

At this bustling port, where massive cranes above cargo ships load and unload goods in perpetual motion, a strange division of labour is apparent.

Dock workers in Mozambique: but very few Africans work at sea. Credit: James Hall/IPS

“It’s a good question,” said Samito Oliviera, a Maputo clearing and forwarding agent.  “Unemployment is high and migrant work is second nature to Africans. Why don’t they go to sea, where the pay is good?”

Dudley Visser, an executive with the Norwegian shipping line Höegh Autoliners, transporting cars into Southern Africa via Maputo, said “Africans can be attractive workers for shipping lines because of labour costs.

“A few years ago most sailors were from the Philippines. But when the cost of Filipino labour rose, China became the main seafarer labour market. African workers would be affordable if they were available.”

Pieter Venter, general manager of the Grindrod Maputo Car Terminal, where cars are offloaded en route to inland customers, said “All my workers are Mozambicans. I have no problem finding workers.”

Why then do these workers remain on the dockside, where wages are lower than those of seafarers?

Carlos, a tall, strapping forklift operator driving up ship ramps to offload cargo, replied “I would not want to go to sea. I could drown.”

A co-worker laughs, “He is lying!  Before he came here he was a river man. His job was to swim across the river where there is no bridge, carrying people on his back.”

Indeed, Africans have been water people, sailing coastal areas and navigating rivers and lakes for millennia.

“That’s true, but we Africans are not historically ocean-going.  And as a people we harbour memories of ancestors who were taken against their will in ships to lands across the sea, and they never returned,” said Carlos Manjate, an operations manager at Maputo’s port.

A number of dock workers said they really would not like “a sailor’s lonely life”.

“I don’t want to leave my wife for so many months, because there are no women at sea. If you work down in the mines you live in a hostel, but there are always women there, African women,” said Dominque, a stevedore.

Visser, the Norwegian shipping executive, said the “companionship” issue had become universal, as the nature of shipping had changed.

“The romance has gone out of being a sailor, and this has had repercussions on our ability to staff ships. In the old days, ships would dock at port, and sailors could enjoy days roaming a new country.  At least there would be an eight-hour layover for a night on the town.

“Now, because of strict itineraries, ships are in and out of ports in hours. Our crews spend six months at sea,” he said.

“In the old days seafarers would be teenagers. They didn’t have kids or responsibilities.Today sailing is a lifetime career that is skilled work. Some people don’t want to be separated from their families,” said Michelle Fitt, principal of the S.A. Maritime School in Durban, South Africa.

Her school, which has close ties with the maritime industry, does not teach seafaring but rather landside jobs for the shipping industry, and port management. Her student body is 90 percent female, an indication of who will be running Africa’s shipping lines and port offices in the future.

Ship ownership is another reason why African seafarers are scarce, notes Fitt. “All the shipping lines that come to Africa are foreign-owned companies. If you had an African shipping line there would likely be African seafarers operating their ships,” she said.

Other port officials agreed that a localised shipping industry would be required to produce African seafarers.

“China has a big labour pool for sailors, and doesn’t have to import Africans. Africans who go overseas to learn skills usually go for management skills and not labour jobs. They make the effort to come back as doctors, not sailors,” said Oliveira.

Also, the degree of knowledge and skill acquired for the job of seafarer would elevate an African worker to a level that would make him a valuable employee landside, given Africa’s longstanding indigenous skills shortage.   “Men and women who dedicate themselves to that degree of training usually get jobs at home, and would not need to engage in what they consider a strange job in an unusual environment,” said Fitt.

But once the job of seafaring is pioneered by more African sailors, the job may seem less “unusual” and more appealing to others.

“All it takes is a few African seafarer to blaze a trail, earn a good living, and show how it’s done,” said Oliveira.

One incentive would be affirmative action programmes enacted by Africa’s coastal countries.

“There are so many African ports. Everything that goes into and out of Africa comes through the ports. The industry is huge. It seems a logical idea for countries to enact affirmative action legislation requiring shipping lines that dock regularly at their ports to employ some African sailors,” Oliveira said.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MALKERNS, Swaziland , Feb 14 2009 (IPS)

A developing national arts scene requires a developing national arts center, with luck one that is owned and operated by artists themselves. In Swaziland, the growth of indigenous talent has been complemented by the flowering of a venue popular with performers, audiences and critics.

House on Fire is creating opportunities for Swazi artists. Credit: James Hall/IPS

Poetry readings where local writers perform verse began in November in this intimate venue that ceaselessly expands in an almost organic manner, responding to new needs. The original open-air stage (now equipped with a retractable roof) is used for concerts, dances and live performances from plays to magicians.

It is also the venue for Swaziland’s only performing arts festival, held in August each year when temperatures again start to rise in the Southern Hemisphere.

“We called the festival Bush Fire because it connotes a hot and unstoppable event sweeping across the country,” said Jiggs. In 2008, the festival’s second edition welcomed thousands of festivalgoers to a clearing in the sugarcane.

“I got my start at House on Fire. It nurtured me,” said Bholoja Ngubane, Swaziland’s hottest new singer. Combining jazz with traditional Swazi rhythms and singing in the melodic SiSwati language, Bholoja will record his first CD in France this year.

“He has a tremendous, powerful voice,” said Thorne. “It will be exciting to see how he grows as an artist.”

Thorne noted that Swazi artists who display talent most often cross the border to seek training and opportunities to perform and record in South Africa. Johannesburg is just four hours’ drive from House on Fire, and hosts music and television production industries that small, impoverished Swaziland is unable to sustain.

“There are very few Swazis who can earn a living through their music or art. The ones who can are gospel singers. They have a big following and their CDs can be marketed at churches,” said Vusi Nkambule, Acting CEO at the Swaziland National Council of Arts and Culture.

Aside from some clubs where popular local DJs hold sway, and a mostly shuttered theatre in the capital Mbabane, the country offers few professional venues where budding artists may develop their skills before audiences.

“That is why House on Fire is so important to us. I can develop my craft there,” said Bholoja. He was featured at last year’s Bush Fire, along with major international groups like the Soweto String Quartet. The exposure brought him to the attention of professional musicians and managers who were amongst the thousands of festivalgoers.

What impresses visitors about House on Fire is the artistic vibrancy of the venue. “This place is a work of art,” said Sarah Stewart, a cultural anthropologist traveling from the UK.

Local carvers were initially employed to create fantastic sculpted lighting fixtures and bas-relief to decorate the venue’s towers, arches and faux stone walls.

The decorations have led to a line of individual works of art their creators call “icons” that combine sculpture, painting and theatre. A creative collaboration between Thorne and sculptor Shadrack Masuku, each is a functioning piece of furniture, either chairs or sofas, with human forms rising out of the sides and backing.

Sculpted out of indigenous woods, carved African men and women seem to grow like trees from the chair backings. They are brilliantly costumed and operatic in appearance, but their expressions seem distant, bearing the secrets and dignity of African spirits. These beings – torsos morphing from chair backs and sofa sides – are three-dimensional and startlingly lifelike, but they are also elusive. You can stare into their eyes, but they look right through you.

Word has circulated through the international artistic community that Swaziland is producing works of art. Pieces from House on Fire have a gallery in Johannesburg, where the Oppenheimers, among the city’s most influential art patrons, recently set one of Thorne and Masuku’s icons amid the Picassos and Matisses of their private home gallery. Several pieces have been sold to American and European collectors.

Carving is done beside the venue’s Moorish-style patio behind the main stage. A trio of craftsmen, Masuku with Phuzi Mtshali and Themba Magagula, set to work with jacaranda and marula wood, beads and other appliqué, and paint.

“We were all stone and wood carvers in Pigg’s Peak (in mountainous northern Swaziland near the South African border). We carved animals and masks for the tourists, and sold them by the road. Now we have moved from craft to art,” said Masuku.

The carvers used to bang out five souvenir carvings a day. Now they collaborate for five weeks to produce a single icon.

“We feel we are artists now, not just souvenir makers,” said Magagula, who might earn US $10 from the sales of his roadside carvings on a good day. Now he splits the profit on an “icon” that can fetch several thousand dollars when sold internationally, like one chair recently shipped to New York.

Meanwhile, more walls, towers, and rooms are being added to the venue, all decorated with sculptures from an expanding workshop. Some of the new areas are turned over to twice yearly art shows where local painters display their works for the first time.

“You can’t have musicians without a place to perform, or painters or artists without spaces to display,” said Nkambule of the National arts and culture council.

“With more venues, there will be more artists. They go hand in hand,” he said.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Sep 3 2008 (IPS)

What happens to a nation whose people depend on the largesse of international donor agencies for their existence, once support is withdrawn?

If forecasts for the small landlocked African nation of Swaziland are an indication, the granting of temporary relief may be followed by a new humanitarian emergency.

"The poverty solution we've heard about for so many years has been sustainable development: give people the tools they need to continue producing without outside assistance," said Titus Mahlalela, a food aid distributor working with the international NGO World Vision. World Vision distributes some of the food aid brought in by the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) to local communities; at present, this aid keeps a record 600,000 Swazis alive – more than 60 percent of the population.

Mahlalela's view is that the International community is willing to help alleviate Immediate emergencies, but is less attracted to long-term commitments required for lasting solutions.

An initiative of another UN agency, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), illustrates what happens when assistance that might help farmers achieve sustainable food production is prematurely withdrawn.

A rise in food production last year is likely to be reversed this year, FAO officials say, as farmers who received assistance have nowhere else to turn. Ploughing season is only weeks away.

"They gave me what I needed to farm last year. Seeds and fertiliser. We don't know if we will receive these this year. I for one don't know what I will do without these things," said Amos Nhlabela, a 45 year-old small farmer in Mlimba, a hamlet 50 km north of the central commercial hub Manzini.

Recent efforts to boost crop production were based not on achieving sustainability but were instead focused on alleviating crop losses due to drought. A false assumption was made: once rains returned, so would crop yields. In fact, lack of rainfall was only one obstacle to achieving sustained food production in Swaziland, where eight out of ten people depend on subsistence farming for survival.

For generations, Swazis accepted a cycle of bounty and famine that characterised traditional farming, which is dependent on sun and rain and manure from the oxen that plough the fields.

When Swaziland gained its independence 40 years ago, it routinely recorded food surpluses because a population one third smaller than it is today did not consume as much from available land.

"Three things happened in the intervening decades," noted Carl Dlamini, an agriculture field officer in the central Manzini Region. "The population grew but there wasn't enough farmland, so new generations moved onto marginal land that could barely produce.

"Secondly, climate change brought droughts that made formerly good land only marginally productive and marginal land completely incapable of producing crops. For the last 15 years much of the eastern Lubombo region has been droughty.

"The third factor cutting into agriculture production has been AIDS."

A concentrated and substantial amount of aid last year proved beneficial. In 2007, food production was down by 80 percent in some areas, and all parts of the country saw crop losses due to hot and dry weather. An emergency relief call from UN agencies brought a response that financed partial recovery.

WFP provided food aid, and the FAO funded purchases of farm inputs – seeds, fertilizer, tractors – required for individual farm production. A WFP/FAO crop assessment team found that agricultural output in 2008 agriculture output was twice 2007 levels, though still below that of the previous four years.

Ironically, the success of last year's emergency relief resulted in the end of the government-declared national food emergency. Last year's FAO budget of US $3 million has been slashed to $500,000.

For the coming planting season, which is imminent in some parts of the country as spring rains begin falling, only one out of six farmers who received inputs from FAO last year will receive them this year. The impoverished country's treasury has no funds to make up the shortfall.

"We had a good response to the donor appeal last year. But the drought emergency is over," said Tamie Dlamini, Programme Director of FAO's Swaziland operations. "We will have another shortfall in food production this year, not from drought but from farmers not planting because they cannot afford inputs."

Less than 60 percent of Swaziland's arable land is under cultivation, partly due to AIDS decimating the agricultural work force. This year, input costs will be another important limit on agricultural production. Fertiliser costs are expected to be up 200 percent over last year come the height of the planting season in November.

Rising fuel prices are reflected in the higher cost of private tractor rental. The Ministry of Agriculture has too few tractors, and waits have caused some farmers to plant late.

"I cannot afford fertiliser. I cannot afford seeds. I cannot afford to rent a tractor. I can borrow my cousin's oxen to plough, but he also has no seeds or fertiliser," said another farmer, Sonny Dube, Amos Nhlabela's neighbour.

"Why is money available for emergency relief, but not for making farming affordable? Why are there too few tractors? Where is the funding for a self-replenishing seed bank that farmers can draw from?" asked Connie Hlope, one of the few women agricultural field officers in the country. Her job is to advise farmers on planting schedules and tractor hire.

"You hear why farming hasn't been 'sustainable.' People blame donor dependency. You hear that people refuse to plough because they get food from the WFP. But I've never been able to substantiate that. It's a myth," Hlope said.

An interview with a rural resident confirmed this. Amanda Mavuso, a widow and mother of five who manages to cultivate a two-acre field in central Swaziland said, "The food we grow is good. We enjoy it. The food from overseas is not quite right. It tastes different. No one around here prefers donor food."

If she and her family do end up accepting donor food, it will be because she is unable to do the work of running a farm by herself. She has no money for inputs and depends on the assistance of neighbouring families to do the hard tasks of ploughing, weeding and harvesting.

Until programmes are devised to meet the fundamental needs of small-scale agriculture that feed a majority of Swazis and which once produced a national surplus of agricultural production, "sustainability" will remain more of a developmental cliché than an achievable reality in the lives of small farmers.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MANZINI, Jul 24 2008 (IPS)

In a narrow and still winter-brown valley, little more than a crevice between rocky mountains, Gogo Ndlovu looks after her five young orphaned grandchildren.

One in 3 Swazi children is an orphan -- as the grandparents who often care for them die, they will become still more vulnerable. Credit: James Hall/IPS

"The rain came but it stopped. The maize stopped growing. We have nothing, nothing. I don't know what to do. When you go to the store for food they want money," she said.

The boys, Famuza (9), Sifiso (11), Sandla (11) and Mbuso (10), and their sister Nelisiwe (12) have little to wear to school. Two boys share a pair of shoes while the others are barefoot. They usually go to school hungry, and wait for a United Nations Children's Fund lunch.

Relatively speaking, Gogo Ndlovu's brood is fortunate in that they are on the radar of aid agencies, while some households are not. The family receives emergency food rations from the World Food Programme (WFP) and the children attend school, their fees paid by a government programme.

This family is just one of many facing the same situation in this small mountainous kingdom in Southern Africa. With an HIV prevalence of 19 percent – the highest in the world – AIDS is having an unprecedented impact on Swaziland. Life expectancy has fallen from 60 years to 31 years, the world's lowest figure, and one in three children are orphaned or left vulnerable from AIDS. Last year, about 40 percent of the population needed food aid.

"AIDS has been a contributor to the food shortage. Families lose their household heads, the able-bodied men and women. What is left are grandparents who are at that time of their lives when they expect to retire and they often need care themselves, but they must again raise a new generation of children. The grandparents are too old to tend the fields, and the children are too small," said Abdoulaye Balde, country representative for the WFP.

The land goes fallow, which by Swazi custom puts the children in jeopardy. On Swazi Nation Land where 80 percent of Swazis reside as subsistence farmers, chiefs allocate homesteads for families to live as long as the land is utilized. Some chiefs have expelled old and young residents of a homestead after the middle-generation dies of AIDS. Either the remaining family is absorbed into relatives' homesteads or they are left destitute and homeless.

The Swaziland branch of Women in Law in Southern Africa has made orphans' property rights a priority. An organisation of HIV-positive women Swazis for Positive Living (SWAPOL), as well as UNICEF, work to ensure that children are not severed from the places they call home.

Siphiwe Hlope, founder SWAPOL said; "We engage in projects to assist people affected by AIDS. Since we started in 2003, at least one quarter of the money we earn from our agricultural and sewing projects goes to orphans ."

Another member of SWAPOL, a 45 year-old widowed seamstress named Sunshine Kunene, said; "The danger facing (orphans) is neglect, because the numbers are so high. One out of five people in this country will be children under 15, orphaned after both parents die of AIDS, and that will only be in two or three years. Where are the resources to take care of them?"

Social worker Agnes Khumalo added; "Swaziland cannot cope on its own. How can it? No country could handle an AIDS crisis on top of a food and humanitarian crisis. Almost half of pregnant women in Swaziland are HIV positive."

Her views are echoed by recent research produced by the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division, based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. It has brought attention to the fact that although Swaziland is being devastated by AIDS, it is not getting the priority it needs from the international community. The country is handicapped because the economic successes of the past mean it is categorised as a middle-income country, and thus cannot access the support that low-income countries receive from the international donor community.

The report, 'Reviewing Emergencies for Swaziland' (2007), indicates that by the time Swaziland's rapidly declining economy plunges it into the low-income category, it may be too late for any intervention to be effective. Death rates now exceed the daily mortality thresholds used by agencies as an indicator of an emergency, the report states, and a new response is needed.

Despite the implementation of many support programmes, their ability to respond to the overall need is apparent.

While international agencies debate the terms, Gogo Ndlovu struggles on. Her grandchildren trudge two kilometers of rocky pathway to a community care point for orphans. They sit against an outcropping of stones with other children, while a pot of porridge bubbles over a wood fire.

A woman ladles the porridge into bowls, and the children blow on it to cool it because they have no spoons and must eat with their fingers.

The silence lasts a few minutes, then a soccer ball made of plastic bags wrapped layer over layer is produced. They kick it over a small patch of dirt, shouting.

Scrubbing the big iron pot, the cook looks at them. "It really takes so little to make them normal, doesn't it?"

*with additional reporting by Kathryn Strachan in Johannesburg.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Mar 11 2008 (IPS)

A substantial increase in the number of Swazis requiring food aid has raised questions in this Southern African country. Why the rise, and how long are the higher numbers likely to prevail? More fundamentally, what has caused such widespread and enduring hunger to begin with?

“We need to dig deeper for answers, particularly when we hear donor fatigue may cut into the emergency contributions that are now keeping Swazis alive,” said Charles Dlamini, a food aid distribution manager in the central Manzini region.

In his annual budget speech, delivered to parliament recently, Finance Minister Majozi Sithole noted that 665,000 Swazis out of a total population of 953,000 now require food assistance.

Only a few months ago, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) had projected that 407,000 people would need food aid by this time. Rains since the start of the planting season in November had even raised hopes of fewer dependants.

In interviews with government and humanitarian officials, and with persons on small farms and in urban settlements affected by food shortages, IPS came across a variety of explanations for the current situation.

“I have been urging for months that people take advantage of the rains and plant crops like in other years. The back of last year’s drought has been broken. But some people are wary of planting; they remember how the rains stopped falling in the past and all their work went for nothing,” said Ben Nsibandze, chairman of the National Emergency Management Committee.

Last year’s drought was historic: up to 80 percent of crops failed in formerly productive areas, while harvests were absent in hardest hit regions. The international community stepped in to assist.

“Unfortunately, the lesson learned by some people is that they don’t have to worry if they have no crops. They will be given food. They will be provided for. This laziness has led to dependency, and it is why many fields were not ploughed this year,” said Dlamini.

Fears about a culture of dependency have also been voiced by others.

Nsibandze has warned against it, as has legislator Trusty Gina. “The dependency syndrome is killing the nation,” he told parliament recently.

Some 80 percent of Swazis live as subsistence farmers on land overseen by chiefs, existing much as generations of their ancestors did. When rains cease, people require food aid to avoid starvation.

“Government hoped that rural men working for the agricultural plantations could support their families on their wages,” said an economist with a bank in the capital, Mbabane, in reference to estates where export crops such as sugar cane and citrus are grown. “But wages are low, and inflation is high.”

The Ministry of Agriculture mounted an agriculture summit last August to seek answers to Swaziland’s perennial food shortage problems. In addition to government, the private sector, U.N. groups and farmers participated. But to date no report of the summit’s outcome has been released, and no suggestions offered on how to return Swaziland to the position it occupied in the 1970s of being a net food exporter.

AIDS is another contributing factor to the dearth of food in this country; at 33.4 percent, the country’s adult HIV prevalence rate is the highest in the world.

“There are no able bodied people to tend the farms; the surviving elderly people and children can’t do it,” said Nonhlanhla Simelane, an HIV counsellor in Mbabane. “Wage earners in town used to come back to the farm to tend the crops, but we see less of that because AIDS mortality is as high in urban areas as in the countryside.”

AIDS groups see the nation’s food shortage very much as a health issue, and they doubt that production will return to normal before the pandemic has been brought under control.

Greed may also be playing a role.

According to Sipho Shongwe, minister of regional development and youth affairs, the numbers of people in need of food aid have been inflated by local authorities seeking to sell supplies for cash. Similarly, school principals are accused of trying to profit from aid claimed for AIDS orphans.

“One wonders what lessons on morality our children will learn from principals who are guilty of deliberately increasing the number of orphans in their schools?” asks Shongwe. Himself a Swazi chief, he also accuses other chiefs of fraud in connection with food aid.

Yet, there are no hard figures showing the extent of the alleged misappropriation, and food aid organisations contacted by IPS doubt this appreciably raises the total of aid recipients.

“I don’t think that cheating is raising the overall number of recipients that much. They say officials want to sell the food. Sell to who? Sixty percent of the local population lives in absolute poverty, and part of the food crisis is (that) they cannot purchase basic foodstuffs,” said a programme officer with a U.N. agency.

The WFP office in Mbabane told IPS that the agency’s food distribution system is based on information from local community committees which canvas homes to establish need. The same holds true for children’s care points in urban and rural areas, where local committees send orphans and vulnerable children for hot meals provided by WFP contributors, primarily the United States.

What, then, will it take for Swaziland to cease being a country in perpetual want?

“I think most importantly we need the political will to find solutions. I think the national leadership has become comfortable with food dependency as well,” said Dlamini. “As long as the international community is giving, why bother?”

Even with much of the nation requiring food aid, “…leadership doesn’t act like it is a crisis…I think that is why the emergency agriculture summit never amounted to anything.”

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Mar 3 2008 (IPS)

Climate change appears to have permanently altered certain areas of east and southern Swaziland, where good harvests have not been achieved for over a decade. Agriculture officials and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) now question whether these areas can still support communities.

"Before donor fatigue sets in, we have no choice but to confront the obvious. Otherwise we can be accused of turning a blind eye," said Charles Ndwandwe, an agriculture extension officer in the eastern Lubombo region, which has never fully recovered from a drought that devastated the country in 1992.

Climate conditions have also been difficult over recent months. IPS has ascertained that summer rains failed to materialise in Lavumisa, in the eastern Lubombo.

This has taken a severe toll on harvests of maize, the staple food of Swaziland. Maize that was planted in the spring months of November and December is now largely desiccated due to lack of rainfall (the last measurable rains in the region are said to have fallen on Dec. 27).

To make matters worse, a heat wave struck Lubombo last month, prompting the National Emergency Relief Council to express concern about the situation there.

Such difficulties, coupled with the country&#39s small population and the availability of other land, have prompted suggestions that Swazis might be relocated in response to persistent drought.

"There are unused government farms in agriculturally viable parts of the country. Why not relocate families who cannot scratch out an existence in Lavumisa and depend on food aid year after year? Food aid should not be a lifestyle. People become dependent," said Walker Nkambule, a businessman from Manzini, the commercial hub of the country.

Currently there are state farms lying idle that government economic planners intend incorporating into large-scale agriculture projects when funding becomes available. They reject proposals to convert the land into small subsistence farms, claiming this would not be economically viable.

"Subsistence farming is very traditional but it only supplements family income from other sources. Nobody can live on it anymore," said Ndwandwe.

At present, 80 percent of the population resides on small farms located on communal land that is overseen by chiefs. Government would like to see farmers combine their fields into larger co-operative ventures.

Christopher Fakudze, an economist who works with the Ministry of Natural Resources to develop water needs projections and water resource management, disagrees with the proposal to abandon drought prone areas. "Swaziland is geographically a small place, and there is no reason why we cannot pipe water to where it is needed."

The large scale projects required to pipe in water would be very expensive, however.

Amidst widespread poverty, few people can afford to move away from inhospitable land of their own accord. According to the 2007/2008 United Nations Human Development Report, 47.7 percent of people in Swaziland live on less than a dollar a day – and 77.8 percent on less than two dollars a day.

These figures reflect the widespread joblessness in this Southern African nation; 2007 statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation put unemployment in Swaziland at up to 40 percent, a figure that includes people who are too discouraged to seek work.

Mphilo Dube, a 20-year-old resident of Lavumisa, spent three months trying to find work at the Matsapha Industrial Estate, where the country&#39s few factories are concentrated, in central Swaziland. "I gave up when I got tired of going hungry. At least here I am with my family," Dube said.

Poverty and climatic hardship elicit a stoic response from many Swazis.

"There is a reason that Swaziland is a stable country despite its humanitarian crisis. The people are conservative. They prefer hardship to the unknown that change brings," said a political scientist at the University of Swaziland.

"This is why people stay in those dusty lifeless areas, and why government policy has been for poverty alleviation where people live, rather than relocation."

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Jan 30 2008 (IPS)

Did Swaziland learn nothing from last year’s devastating drought? Some relief agencies and agricultural officials are shaking their heads in dismay that 2007’s devastating crop failures did not spark reform in the way land is utilised in this small country of less than one million people.

"There was hardship from last year’s drought, but also an opportunity. I fear we have lost the will to seize that opportunity because now the drought appears to be over," said Nathan Dlamini, an agriculture ministry field officer in the central Manzini region.

Eighty percent of crops withered and died in the fields of some regions, and all four provinces experienced drought-related crop failures last year. Rains ceased in Dec. 2006, and only resumed sporadically after the key stage of the maize plant’s development had passed. Maize is the nation’s staple food – grown by four out of five Swazis.

"At the crucial time in the maize plant’s development, there was no nourishing water, because few of the farmers have irrigation," Ben Nsibandze, chairman of the National Disaster Management Council, told IPS. "There had never been such a widespread lack of rainfall in our modern history," said Nsibandze, whose office gauges the number of people affected by emergencies and provides data to local and international relief organisations.

This year, rains have returned, and are steadily moistening fields and gradually replenishing depleted lakes and reservoirs.

"No one is talking about water rationing any more," said Dlamini. "Because of the electricity crisis everyone’s attention has turned to power shortages. We are lurching from crisis to crisis without doing anything to fix fundamental issues," he said.

The effects of the great drought of 2007 still linger. Forty percent of the population is dependant on some form of food assistance to survive – from school children whose only complete meal each day is eaten at school and provided by the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to food-short families who receive monthly packages of maize meal, soy blend, and cooking oil from the World Food Programme (WFP).

At the beginning of the planting season – September though November – subsistence farmers were reluctant to commit their seeds to soil, fearful of a repeat of last year’s drought. Lack of rainfall had persisted in areas like the eastern Lubombo region for 15 years. Another reason was welfare dependence – traditional leaders and others are decrying some farmers’ apathy to grow crops because they knew they would be fed by the WFP.

Late January finds the fields green again with two-metre high maize stalks – – their brilliant translucent green leaves shading budding cobs that signal plentiful harvests come May.

"Everything is back to normal – nothing is being done to protect us against the next drought, even though there was a big Agriculture Summit last year to seek such solutions," Amos Ngwenya, a farming implement dealer in Manzini, told IPS.

"We must find ways to ensure food security for the nation," said Minister of Agriculture Mtiti Fakudze in August when he opening government’s Agriculture Summit in Manzini. Other government officials, relief organisations, commercial farmers, and traditional authorities echoed Fakudze’s sentiment.

Critics in the Swazi media have expressed concern that the summit was another costly "talk shop" that provided a photo-op for politicians, but would result in no concrete action.

This month, Swaziland Livestock Technical Services, an agricultural consultancy firm, expressed dismay that even a long-overdue preliminary report with recommendations is locked up in government.

"One reason farmers continue to grow maize is they find no market for other crops. Maize can be stored and eaten by the farmer’s family later, but not vegetables, eggs or milk, which government has encouraged farmers to diversify into," said Ngwenya. "There was a lot of talk at the agriculture summit about establishing markets for local production and cut down dependency on imports from South Africa, but that is all it was, talk."

Abdoulaye Balde, country representative to Swaziland for the WFP, told IPS, "There are places where they should not grow maize. Other crops would do better. But it is hard to break the cycle of growing the same crops."

Over the years, Swazi farmers have remained conservative, but not resistant to opportunities. Cotton was grown as a drought-tolerant crop in the late 1980s, but failed to take off for lack of a distribution system for the raw cotton fibre. In the 1990s, farmers rode a boom in sugar cane prices and sugar became Swaziland’s top export – earning the nickname "the real Swazi gold."

Many farmers followed government’s suggestion to form cooperatives and pool their land resources for sugar cane cultivation. The relevant ministry even changed its name to the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives. But a drop in sugar prices dampened profits, prompting grumbling that "you can’t survive on sugar cane."

While government concentrated its poverty alleviation efforts on foreign direct investment in urban projects like manufacturing, no dent has been made in U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) data showing two out of three Swazis live in absolute poverty.

On small farms agricultural production remained identical in the 21st century as when the nomadic Swazis settled down to cultivate fields in the mid- 1800s.

The answer may be to acknowledge that the single-family farms may never be economically viable, and should be viewed as mere residences where some family food is grown, weather permitting.

"The fields are too small. Over the years the population has grown and arable land has been divided and subdivided. Even a bumper crop won’t be that profitable because of size – maybe ten surplus bags of maize per household," said Dlamini.

If Swazis cannot achieve food security and end poverty by reforming subsistence family farms, a solution may be found in Agri-Industry, which employs farmers to cultivate fields and pays them wages to support their families.

Two large-scale Agri-Industry schemes were announced late last year, located in the drought-stricken southern and eastern areas of the country. Both involve the cultivation of biofuel crops, which would be distilled into ethanol and other biofuel products within Swaziland. Three thousand people would be employed to grow biofuel fodder and work the distillation plant. The government will provide the land, and no farmers are to be displaced from their ancestral homes. In fact, farmers were invited to grow biofuel crops to sell to the distillery.

"This may be the way to go. Turn subsistence farmers into wage earners so they can support their families, while they remain at their rural farmers," said Dlamini.

The success of the approach will not be seen until next year, when biofuel production is scheduled to begin.

Meanwhile, Swaziland requires agricultural reform now as much as when crops were failing a year ago.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Jan 17 2008 (IPS)

Amanda Dube is literally ‘dirt poor’. Fierce bush fires ravaged Swaziland for months in 2007, and repeatedly swept over the hilly area of Mliba where she lives. Fires burned the trees and vegetation on the small sloping plot where the widowed mother of three attempts to scratch out a maize crop.

Dube was unable to produce any food last year because of drought. The drought wiped out 80 percent of the country’s maize production, and this week even before new trees and maize plants could take root, powerful rainstorms sent torrents of water down the hill and past her stick and thatch hut, carrying away top soil.

“The soil was very poor before. This is a very rocky area and not really good for growing food. But now there is hardly any dirt at all,” the 37-year-old Dube told IPS.

Dube says that she and other Swazis like her are not likely to see the national economy fundamentally strengthened through developmental assistance because in the eyes of the international agencies that decide such things, her country is too affluent.

Two-thirds of the population of Swaziland – less than one million people – live on less than one dollar a day. The unemployment rate is 40 percent, and more than four out of ten Swazis depend on some form of food assistance to stay alive.

Dube’s husband died after “growing very thin” three years ago. Like most Swazis, she will not say he succumbed to an AIDS-related illness because of the stigma attached to AIDS.

Dube is entitled to food aid. She can collect a meagre ration of maize, beans, and cooking oil imported by the World Food Programme (WFP) and distributed by the international relief organisation World Vision.

“The economy is performing poorly, especially in comparison with the other nations of the region,” said Richard Ndwandwe, an investment advisor with an Mbabane bank, told IPS. “We have not achieved 3.0 percent economic growth in a decade, and the central bank says an annual growth rate of 3.6 percent is required just to keep up with population growth,” Ndwandwe said, stressing that the, “net result has been a deterioration in the standard of living for almost all Swazis.”

“It is the rich minority that is skewing the statistical picture, and making the country appear better off than it is for most people,” explained Ndwandwe.

“Social inequalities are increasingly leaving Swaziland with one of the world’s most-skewered income distributions,” noted Peter Beck Christiansen, the European Union’s (EU) ambassador to Swaziland.

Colonial-era landholders and business people who did not have their properties compromised when Swaziland gained its independence 40 years ago, government leaders, and a small – but well-off – clique of Swazi entrepreneurs have amassed wealth that has raised the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Less than twenty percent of the population controls eighty percent of the nation’s wealth, according to the World Bank. But, the World Bank – using GDP to classify the country’s state of economic development – has placed Swaziland in the “low-middle income” category of nations.

“We are far from being a middle income country, but we are not considered a low income country, and this makes a world of difference when it comes to accessing development funding,” said Ndwandwe.

“It is not a fair rating,” Abdoulaye Balde, the country director for the WFP, told IPS from his Mbabane office that coordinates the world’s response to Swaziland’s food shortage crisis. “It does not take into consideration that way most people are living. We are always telling this to our donors,” he stressed.

The director of another humanitarian relief NGO – which receives World Bank logistical assistance – said, “There is so much need in the world and so many peoples competing for limited resources that it is easy for an NGO to go by World Bank guidelines to decline assistance to a country like Swaziland. It’s not necessarily fair.”

Several times this past year, Prime Minister Themba Dlamini and Majozi Sithole, his finance minister, reminded the country that Swaziland does not qualify for low-interest loans or interest-free grants awarded to countries classified as “low income” although a large majority of Swazis – like Dube – live in absolute poverty.

Denied developmental funds, the government’s response has been to encourage economic growth by boosting the private sector, with the hope of increased tax revenue from businesses.

While foreign direct investment (FDI) is sought by globetrotting teams of government officials, ordinary Swazis are encouraged to become “small entrepreneurs.”

Christiansen signed a treaty with Swazi leadership for a 100 million dollar aid package, Wednesday.

“I think that it is a particular responsibility of the country to ensure that ever citizen received a fair share of the national wealth,” Christiansen said.

However, not even the country’s small – and by law nonexistent – opposition groups who speak about countering the ruling monarchy’s grip on governance, have called for wealth redistribution.

“The rich are not going away, and that’s the only way to make Swaziland statistically a low income country,” Anthony Simelane, an attorney based in the central commercial hub Manzini, told IPS. “There is not going to be wealth redistribution that would benefit the poor. The country is denied development funds to help the poor, so all government can hope to do is boost the economy and reap taxes,” Simelane said.

The impediment to this plan is government corruption. Sithole has estimated that the amount of government money lost to various forms of corruption annually equals the country’s national debt.

Christiansen touched on corruption when he signed the EU’s developmental agreement. “I have learned in my three years in Swaziland that no amount of funding or donor assistance can lead to development if the right conditions are not in place. Deficiencies in the areas of governance have and will continue to seriously limit your development progress, with or without the HIV/AIDS threat, ” he told his Swazi hosts.

The EU’s aid package is contingent upon the implementation of what Christensen called “an ambitious governance reform programme to enable Swaziland to reach at least the level of other Southern African countries.”

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Jan 10 2008 (IPS)

As the new school year begins here many destitute or orphaned children are in need of assistance to pay for their educations. An unknown number of urban youngsters, however, are slipping through the social welfare net.

"Impoverished children in the country’s urban areas might run into the thousands," Juanita Mkhonta, a social welfare worker in the central commercial town Manzini, told IPS.

"It occurred to me during the Christmas holidays, when there were several news stories about urban orphans receiving food gift baskets," Mkhonta said. "I thought, if they were discovered by philanthropic individuals without the knowledge of the food aid organizations, how many of these uncounted kids are also lost to the school aid assistance system?"

"The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) did a crop assessment survey in May, and when the teams went from house to house we also did a survey of OVC (orphans and vulnerable children)," said Abdoulaye Balde, WFP Country Representative for Swaziland.

"The informal settlements at Swaziland’s towns were left out of the survey because the populations were considered transitory," noted Mkhonta.

"There are no traditional authorities there or community committees for NGOs to work with. That is why there were so many poor children who received the food donations we read about in the press during the holidays. They said they had no food at home. My thought: If no one has made provisions for their meals, who is looking after their education?" she stressed.

"These kids have been lost in a societal change. Swaziland’s government is geared toward traditional rural life. The U.N. agencies and NGOs are also primarily targeting rural areas for assistance. It’s as if the towns do not exist," said Mkhonta.

The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), for instance, works with traditional rural leaders to assist rural-based orphans and vulnerable children at schools and at neighbourhood care points.

"We really do not do town neighbourhood care points. The food aid we coordinate is primarily for rural schools," Pelucy Ntambirweki, a programme coordinator for UNICEF, told IPS.

The reason is a lack of data, which usually is only available in rural areas where persons in need can be reliably counted.

"Historically, Swazis reside under chiefs in rural areas. Towns are just places you go for jobs, and then the Swazi returns to the parental homestead when work is done," said Albert Dlamini, a ‘runner’, or clerk, for one of Swaziland’s 350 hereditary chiefs.

Even Swazis who own homes in towns are considered subjects of rural chiefs, whose names are affixed to official documents like passports and tax forms.

"So, when people are counted it is at the chiefdoms," Dlamini told IPS.

UNICEF and other social welfare NGOS have enlisted chiefs to assess the number of children in need.

The National Emergency Task Force also employs community committees appointed by chiefs to tabulate orphans and people in need of emergency food assistance. Such committees locate child-headed households in their areas, which are proliferating as HIV/AIDS ravages families.

The data is then used to bring assistance to vulnerable children and place them back in classrooms they left when family finances made payment of school fees unaffordable, or parents died of AIDS, leaving children destitute.

"In rural areas, the children can be known. But in towns, who counts them in the township slums?" noted Dlamini.

Population information collection was extensive in 2007. Not only was last year the time for Swaziland’s once a decade national census, but also the worst drought in modern history cut crop production by 80 percent, and a count of people requiring food assistance was necessary to avoid famine.

The health ministry also undertook its first household health survey in 2007 to determine an accurate picture of the country’s AIDS situation. It found that more than a quarter of sexually active adults are HIV positive – the world’s highest prevalence rate.

With AIDS deaths proliferating because of a slow rollout of anti-retroviral drugs, more children are destined to become orphans.

Swaziland’s charitable organizations, be they faith-based or NGOs, open their doors to anyone in need, but tend to rely on recipients to come to them.

With data unavailable on the scope of children who may be left out of the education system when schools open this month, an informal survey was attempted by IPS. It is not hard to find informal settlements in Manzini, a small town of 30,000 that is Swaziland’s largest urban centre because of such informal settlements, with populations that exceed 60,000.

A visit to a cluster of shacks half hidden by reeds along a small and fetid stream west of the town centre turned up dozens of shy, ill-clothed children. Listless from hunger, they were emboldened by a visitor’s gift of bread and milk to say they were not going to school. Some had never attended class.

"It is because of money. There is none," said Thandi, a ten-year-old girl without parents. She spoke vaguely of relatives in the area.

Would the children like to go to school, they were asked? They all nodded their heads affirmatively, though with apparent apprehension at the prospect of mingling with more experienced and properly dressed children.

Is school what they wished for more than anything else? Answers were negative, "We are hungry all the time. We want food," the children said.

IPS returned the next day with a nurse from the Red Cross, who promised to bring the children to the attention of child welfare workers in the city. By this time, however, Thandi had disappeared. None of the other children had seen her since the previous day.

"That’s the problem. These children come and go. All we know is their numbers are increasing as the economy gets worse and the AIDS deaths mount," said the nurse.

Outgoing Principal Secretary at the Ministry of Education Goodman Kunene says that the government is meeting its promise to finance the educations of all known orphans and vulnerable children.

"About a third of the nation’s school children – about 100,000 – are OVC and getting government assistance. That is a massive amount, and it shows a great commitment on government’s part to ensure that all children receive at least primary education from Grade One to Standard Five," he said.

Kunene says urban schools’ headmasters provide information to the education ministry on the number and whereabouts of their pupils in need of assistance.

However, a source with the Swaziland National Association of Teachers – which is often at odds with government over matters of education policy and financing – questions the reliability of data collection on urban OVC in need of education.

"School headmasters only know their enrolled students, and so it follows that they can report to the education ministry only those students who drop out for financial reasons. A headmaster is not going to know how many kids in the townships should be attending his school but are not. He would not know about unregistered children who may be camped out in a shack right outside the school premises. It’s not his job to do that type of investigation. That is what makes the slums so insidious – the way persons get lost there even to social welfare helpers," he said.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Oct 20 2007 (IPS)

The main religious ceremony of the Swazi people is the "Incwala" or ‘Festival of the First Fruits’, held in late December. Dressed in traditional attire, tens of thousands of Swazi men and women dance and chant prayers to their ancestors. They seek good rains that will ensure abundant crops.

This year, their prayers will be more fervent than ever.

Swaziland is in the grip of another drought, and withered maize stalks in dusty fields, rural women who spend ever more time searching for potable water, residents of urban informal settlements forced to use polluted streams and dropping river levels all testify to a water crisis.

For years Swazi water authorities have denied that there is a fundamental lack of water in the small country of just over a million inhabitants. There was simply a need to distribute available supplies to water scarce areas, they claimed.

"It’s just a matter of delivery," said Jameson Mkhonta, public affairs officer at the government-controlled Swaziland Water Services Corporation, and vice-chairman of government’s Water Crisis Committee.

"Swaziland has lots of rivers flowing through the country. If we had the money to interconnect these rivers, we could become self-sufficient in water during summer," he told IPS. "If we just had some means of harvesting the water during the rainy season, then we could achieve water self-sufficiency all year round."

Yet, the recurrence of drought has cast doubt on these assertions – and raised questions water officials are probably loathe to confront, such as whether some areas of the country are essentially uninhabitable due to previous dry spells going back 15 years.

Swaziland’s population has almost tripled since the kingdom became independent in 1968. This rapid growth has forced local chiefs, who distribute the land on which 80 percent of the population resides, to settle people on marginal land ill-suited for cultivation.

Cattle numbers have also increased, with the livestock denuding hills of vegetation as they graze, and causing soil erosion to become a problem.

Desertification has set in, further compromising water supplies.

Government has described the 2007 drought as "the worst ever" – shown in the way humans and cattle have been forced to share shrunken community ponds and dams.

Ben Nsibandze, chairman of the National Emergency Response Committee, has blamed global warming for the increased frequency of droughts in Swaziland. He said that his countrymen needed to recognise this change.

"This global warming affecting the world, it is hurting us here, too. Rains used to come every September. Now it is November and even December when rains fall," Nsibandze noted.

The Water Crisis Committee has based its plan for national water self-sufficiency on the notion of piping water from where it is available to where it is needed, supplemented by drilling boreholes to tap into groundwater supplies.

In terms of the plan, government will also have to build new reservoirs.

But, the shortcomings of such a scheme are becoming more apparent with each passing day given the lack of rains to fill existing reservoirs, let alone new ones.

Instead, water rationing is in place in the capital, Mbabane, and the upscale community of Ezulwini, where Swaziland’s principal tourist hotels are clustered.

Subsistence farmers have abandoned irrigation systems set up to help them produce marketable vegetable crops or to form co-operatives to grow sugarcane for export.

"A friend of mine grew up around the dam that supplies Mbabane with water, and since the time he was a little boy, he said he has never seen it so low," said Dave Magugula, an Mbabane truck mechanic whose side business, a car wash, is in jeopardy due to the water shortage.

Waters in the reservoir serving Manzini, Swaziland’s largest urban centre, are also receding. Parts of Manzini, such as the Fairview suburb, have faced periodic water cuts since last summer.

Most residents, however, are not connected to the town’s water supply as they live in informal settlements such as KaKhoza and Madonsa. For these persons, the drought has turned daily life into a desperate struggle to find a basic necessity.

Exacerbating the water crisis is a scandal developing in the Logoba informal settlement to the west of Manzini.

Earlier this month, 71 foetuses were found dumped in the stream normally used by residents to wash and cook. Authorities believe that women working at nearby factories faced with unwanted pregnancies had illegal abortions and then dumped the foetuses in the stream.

Police are still in the process of recovering more foetuses, and have prevented the local population from using the stream for the foreseeable future. Impoverished residents now have to purchase water from local vendors.

Christopher Fakudze, an economist at the Ministry of Natural Resources who specialises in water resource management, said that under government targets set 10 years ago, 61 percent of the population was intended to have access to clean water by 2007.

Currently, only 54 percent of the population has access to potable water.

Fakudze argued that connecting more people to the water distribution system would not solve this problem – because there would not be enough water to go round.

He added that drilling more boreholes would be equally futile because the same lack of rainfall that has caused reservoirs to run dry has had similar effects on aquifers.

"Even the water tables are affected, according to our engineers. People drill boreholes, but in a number of cases these are dry wells," said Fakudze.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MANZINI, Oct 11 2007 (IPS)

Located on the outskirts of Swaziland&#39s commercial hub, the state of the art Manzini Waste Treatment Centre was built to end the city&#39s sewage disposal problems. A World Bank loan was secured by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development to construct the 16 million dollar facility: a spotless, landscaped plant which has a lifespan of 25 years.

There&#39s just one problem: most people in Manzini are too poor to make use of the centre.

Middle-class residents complain about having to pay plumbers and building contractors to remove their septic tanks and lay pipes for connecting homes to the sewerage system, and in turn, the plant. Concrete connection points were placed below each residential plot by the project&#39s supervising authority, the parastatal Swaziland Water Services Corporation.

"Who has the thousands of rand to pay for this unnecessary thing? We are happy with our backyard septic tank. We&#39ve had it for 30 years. The city truck pumps it out from time to time for only 100 rand (about 14 dollars)," said Gladys Simelane, a resident of Fairview South Township, a suburb on the hilltop overlooking downtown.

Septic tanks aren&#39t the answer, however. Certain home owners have been remiss about emptying them, and leaking, overflowing tanks have become health hazards that the waste treatment centre was designed to prevent.

Massive revolving arms mix anti-bacteria chemicals in sewage deposited in the plant’s large open air treatment pools. The waste is later pumped into a final treatment centre before being disposed of in the Mzimnene River, which runs through Manzini, with the treated water being cleaner than the river water it joins.

Nearby residents, who were financially rewarded for allowing the sewerage plant to be built in their farming community five kilometres south of Manzini, hardly know it is there. The electricity lines brought in to power the plant have been extended to their homesteads. But, in an inescapable irony, these same homes were not connected to sewer pipes.

The slow pace of establishing connections has caused the plant to be underutilised. Although it has the capacity to treat 250 litres of sewage a second, and can discharge 900 cubic metres of processed water an hour, the centre has not achieved this optimal usage in the two years it has been on line. To keep the plant running efficiently, treated water has to be pumped back into the system to maintain liquid levels at the required volumes in the ponds.

Plans are apparently afoot to send out notices to residents giving them a deadline to connect their homes to the sewerage system and remove septic tanks, after which they may be faced with fines for not doing so.

Of even greater concern to social welfare workers, though, are residents who are excluded from the new sanitation system entirely – and who are said to form the majority of Manzini&#39s inhabitants.

"Most Manzini people live in informal settlements. They are simply not recognised because their areas are not official. They have no septic tanks, no pit latrines," said Agnes Nkambule, a home-based care supervisor for the AIDS hospice group Positive People with AIDS.

"When they need to go to the bathroom they use the bush. They dump their wastewater in the streams."

Officially, Manzini&#39s population stands at about 30,000. However, this only takes into account people who live in designated areas, on registered housing plots. Other government figures indicate that those living in informal settlements help bring the city&#39s population to over 60,000.

Certain informal settlements are decades old. They include KaKhoza, named after a Mozambican storekeeper who set up his business on the western fringe of the city, providing the nucleus for an area now home to several thousand people. Madonsa settlement is on the opposite side of town, while Skum is on the river near the city centre.

"At least these places have names. The large new informal settlements sprouting up between Manzini and Matsapha are nameless. But they all have one thing in common. They are thrown-together slums: houses of wood scraps, cardboard and plastic – no water, no sanitation facilities," said Nkambule.

The Matsapha Industrial Estate, three kilometres west of Manzini, is a magnet for job seekers from poor rural areas, where 80 percent of Swazis live. Only a handful of people succeed in finding jobs; the rest migrate to the informal settlements.

Cholera poses a constant threat in these settlements, and elsewhere in the city, Nkambule added.

A widespread outbreak of this disease would be particularly grave in light of Swaziland&#39s AIDS infection rate. The National Emergency Council on HIV/AIDS lists cholera as a dangerous opportunistic disease in the Southern African nation, where one out of four sexually active adults is HIV positive: the world&#39s highest rate, according to the health ministry.

Matters have been aggravated by the worst drought in living memory, which has led to sporadic water shut-offs in formal neighbourhoods, and a harder scramble for water in the city&#39s slums.

"At least the well-off people have access to clean water. They have electricity; they have road infrastructure and other services. The majority poor have none of these things, and so it is no wonder that they also are left out of the sewage treatment plant," said Thamie Khumalo, a community activist who lives in a straw-roofed mud hut in KaKhoza.

A step towards addressing these difficulties is for slum areas to be transformed into formal settlements through giving title deeds to residents, after which plans can be made to provide services to the settlements.

A pilot programme to this effect has already been carried out by the housing ministry&#39s Urban Development Programme (UDP) in Msunduza, an informal settlement in the capital, Mbabane. The UDP also has plans for Madonsa.

"The method is to bring these settlements into the formal town, and make the people legitimate residents," said UDP Director Napoleon Ntezinde.

But connecting slums to infrastructure won&#39t solve the problem of poverty-stricken residents being unable to pay for services – with defaulters at risk of having their services cut.

"As far as the poor are concerned, the plan is a non-starter," said Khumalo.

According to the United Nations Development Programme, 67 percent of Swazis live on less than a dollar a day.

The Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, an initiative of the World Health Organisation and United Nations Children&#39s Fund, estimates that 48 percent of Swazis have sanitation coverage.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Jan 31 2007 (IPS)

AIDS orphans aren’t the only children suffering in Swaziland. Those who have lost one or both parents to the epidemic have it rough, but so do tens of thousands of other Swazi children vulnerable to food shortages, scant medical care, and unsettled home life.

The bureaucracies of government welfare departments and humanitarian non-governmental organisations call them “orphans and vulnerable children” (OVC), while traditional authorities, such as chiefs, like to refer to them as “children of the communities”, because by custom all destitute Swazi children are the responsibility of their home areas.

But the obligation to feed, clothe, medicate and educate the country’s OVC population in 2007 has become even more onerous. The latest Health Ministry figures show nearly 40 percent of sexually active adults are HIV-positive. With anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs still scarce, the deaths caused by AIDS-related illnesses that follow leave behind a lot of children.

“Traditional coping mechanisms haven’t been able to keep up. Many households are now just grannies and their children. Neither generation can plough and harvest the fields,” said Abdoulaye Balde, country representative for the United Nations World Food Programme.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) counted 80,000 AIDS orphans in 2006, out of a Swazi population of about one million, and estimates the total will rise by 50 percent to 120,000, by 2010.

Nowhere has the crisis in Swaziland’s population of orphans and vulnerable children been more troubling than in education. The Education Ministry’s commitment to keep all OVC in their primary school classes became one of the most contentious political issues of 2006.

Going into 2007, the bottom line is the same: Where will the money come from?

“We do have the money,” Goodman Kunene, Principal Secretary of the Education Ministry, told IPS.

“For 2007, 94,000 children from first grade to standard five will be assisted. That is out of a total enrolment of 300,000, or nearly one-third of all Swazi schoolchildren,” said Kunene.

Musa Dlamini, acting president of the Swaziland National Association of Teachers, still saw challenges ahead when he told IPS: “We are at least approaching the start of the 2007 school year late January with some new thinking, but I cannot say the problem is resolved.”

Last year the divide between the number of OVC in schools and government’s ability to pay for them prompted cash-strapped head teachers to march on the Education Ministry in protest. As the definition of children in need was expanded, teachers felt government had to come up with a more coherent approach to handling needy students.

Pelucy Ntambirweki, a UNICEF project officer said, “The important trend today is to include all vulnerable children in risk reduction programmes, and not just single orphans (who have lost one parent) and double orphans (who have lost both parents).”

Partly from UNICEF’s advocacy, the Education Ministry ordered schools to keep non-paying orphaned and vulnerable children in the classroom. Education Minister Constance Simelane declared it illegal to expel them. But with no additional money to pay their fees, friction with the schools’ head teachers was inevitable.

“The problem is that there was no tally on the actual number of OVC in Swaziland, or the number of OVC who were of school-going age. What government did was set aside 47 million rand, giving for instance 1,500 rand to each secondary school OVC, and when the money ran out, that was it,” said Dlamini.

Confusion was exacerbated by the number of OVC children listed as AIDS orphans who were found in fact to be living with their parents.

A member of parliament is currently on trial on allegations of such fraud. From the central Manzini region, he was charged with registering non-existent OVC at the high school where he was headmaster in 2003. The government would then allocate money to the school on the basis of the number of its OVC.

The case continues, and so do reported incidents of families claiming that their children are orphans, to make them eligible for school fee payments.

“Schools were given lists of AIDS orphans from all over the place – from the chief’s kraal, and church groups and aid workers. There was a lot of fraud,” said Dlamini.

Government officials said the financially strained national treasury cannot afford to raise the 47 million rand allotted to OVC education, so to make this pledge as accommodating as possible, Dlamini said, teachers hammered out an agreement with government to allow school head teachers to vet all OVC to ensure they were legitimate.

The second reform for 2007 will be the dropping of the flat fee of 1,500 rand – or emalangeni, the Swazi currency tied at par with the rand – per pupil. Once a national registry of OVC is tabulated, the government fund for these children will be distributed.

“Headmasters will be able to make reasonable school budgets based on money in hand, rather than promises that have gone unfulfilled in previous years,” Dlamini said.

But one notable innovation is now in place, with government providing some primary school textbooks to students. This has lifted a burden from indigent parents in a country where two-thirds of the people live in chronic poverty, according to the 2006 UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index.

However, universal and free primary education is a luxury still distant for the impoverished nation.

Crisis in the classroom emerged when local schools, funded by pupils’ school fees, had to function without revenue from a growing portion of the student body. Headmasters spoke of shutting schools down. Others used their ingenuity to trim valued programmes to make ends meet.

Several schools in 2006 cancelled cherished academic competitions and sporting events that had allowed students to shine. The cost of these events might involve merely the transportation of pupils and the price of token prizes. That such expenses should prove suddenly unaffordable testified to the meagre budgets of poor Swazi schools.

Efforts to assist orphans and vulnerable children include the establishment of Neighbourhood Care Points in rural areas and Child Care Points in towns to offer rudimentary lessons in reading and other subjects.

Not intended as substitutes for primary schools, the centres are operated by community volunteers. But the tasks of doing the work of full-time pre-school teachers, cooks, caregivers and security personnel has raised interest in finding some sort of stipend for the volunteers.

“Policy is moving toward giving community volunteers some kind of payment for the long, hard hours they put in. It’s the least we can do to show our appreciation,” said UNICEF’s Ntambirweki.

Policy makers have found that in this traditional single-tribe country, ruled by a king, grassroots participation in social programmes are more effective than institutional solutions, which Swazis may view as foreign and imposed on them.

That is why the network of community care points has expanded to over 300 in the past year, and government plans to stick to its policy of keeping OVC at home and in their schools, in familiar surroundings during the conflicted time of parental loss.

“For a country with so many orphans, there aren’t a lot of orphanages. By custom, Swazis like to look after each other; that’s the reason. For this to be done for all the OVC, assistance is needed. But the will is there,” says Buhle Dube.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Dec 18 2006 (IPS)

Swaziland’s civic and national authorities are tackling the growing blight of informal settlements with plans to make squatters the owners of their own properties, and allow them access to sanitary and other city services.

The initiative began with the country’s oldest slum, on the hill above the capital – Mbabane – and in 2007 will seek to transform a blighted community on the outskirts of the central commercial town of Manzini.

“I want to live in a place that is mine, that no one can take from me. That’s what I’ve waited for all my life. I could take pride in that,” said 80-year-old Theresa Dube, a resident of Madonsa township, east of Manzini.

Dube, a widow who receives a small quarterly stipend from the government, said she would “take care” of such a home. “I’d fix it up,” she told IPS.

This is the aspiration the Ministry of Housing hopes to instill in other informal settlement dwellers, inspiring them to improve the places they possess as owners. While the government lays in infrastructure improvements, a community is created out of chaos.

But, the initiative is as yet poorly understood by many of Swaziland’s poor. They expect compensation for shacks that must be bulldozed to make way for paved streets, sewer lines and other infrastructure improvements necessary to establish truly functional and livable neighbourhoods.

“Government put me in a new place, and they tore down my old home. I have received nothing,” complains Eric Ngwenya of Masunduza in Mbabane.

Informal settlements can be found at present not only on the peripheries of towns, where shacks interspersed with muddy and foul rivulets of sewage sprawl over former pasture or farming land. The poor or homeless newcomers to urban areas, drawn by the prospect of jobs, also amass in a checkerboard of neglected sites within the towns themselves.

British colonial authorities, who made Mbabane the capital in 1902, sought to discourage Swazis from having permanent urban addresses at a time when towns were for whites, and Swazis were intended to reside on subsistence farms administered by chiefs on communal Swazi Nation Land in rural areas.

When national independence was achieved in 1968, the construction ban continued at informal settlements like Mangwaneni. The Mbabane City Council wanted a town plan in place before permanent housing was permitted. “Otherwise, we would have had haphazard building everywhere. We needed a street plan, sewage plan, sites set out for fire stations, schools, clinics and shops,” said Napoleon Ntezinde, director of the Ministry of Housing’s Urban Development Project.

The programme to bring order to the informal settlement chaos developed in response to a cholera outbreak in 1985. The sickness swept through Mbabane’s informal settlements, which were subsequently seen not just as unsightly urban blights, but also as health hazards.

“There were few dirt roads in these settlements and no paved roads, sometimes not even footpaths; no water; no sanitary facilities; few or distant schools, stores or clinics; no landline phone system; no electricity,” said Ntezinde.

The project proceeded under the philosophy that settlement dwellers who could possess their residents as plot owners would create the nucleus of a real community.

Masunduza Township was surveyed in the late 1990s, and 1,500 potential residential plots were recorded. As of 2006, over 1,100 plots have been bought by their owners at roughly 1,445 dollars each.

People are replacing their mud houses with cinderblock, permanent structures – as they can afford these. Several hundred permanent structures are up, and project authorities are optimistic that all plots will have permanent structures built on them, as this is the plot owners’ goal.

In Mbabane the project, partly financed by World Bank loans, has laid roads, brought in electricity through the Swaziland Electricity Board and water through the Swaziland Water Services Corporation – and surveyed home sites in preparation for coherent communities that would be incorporated into urban areas.

However, the project ran into trouble when it was perceived by many Swazis as a home building scheme. Project officers were deluged with requests for home building grants. Many informal settlement residents saw this as their entitlement for having to endure slum conditions for years.

“The Urban Development Project does not build houses. It creates conditions for owners to develop their plots in planned, serviced communities,” said John Lowsby, a consultant with the project.

A second controversy concerns the need for urban residents to pay property taxes, known as rates. City governments receive some support from the central government, but largely rely on rate payments to provide services, from road maintenance to rubbish removal.

This has led to condemnation in newspapers, and concerns raised by civil society. “Many elderly residents cannot afford to pay for services without government subsidies,” said Betsy Ndwandwe, a health clinic worker in Manzini.

Ndwandwe fears that the elderly and poor who for years have been squatting in informal settlements may, now that they have been granted title deed ownership of their plots, lose their homes.

“Local governments auction off plots whose owners fall in arrears of rate payments. Electricity and water are cut off by the utilities for non-payment. For someone like my grandmother, who lives with another elderly lady, it will be back to drawing water from the stream,” she frets.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Apr 10 2006 (IPS)

Faith-based organisations that wish to succeed with humanitarian projects in Swaziland have been advised to take into consideration the views and sensibilities of indigenous populations, even if the benefactors believe they are on a mission from God and know what is best for the local people.

“What is neo-colonialism, but rich and powerful Westerners imposing their ways on us? The fact that the imposers are church groups makes no difference, especially when you consider the history of Western religious groups during the colonial era,” said Thandi Dlamini, a community aid worker in rural Siphofaneni, 120 kms southeast of the capital, Mbabane.

“Africans haven’t forgotten the Church agenda of destroying local faiths and cultures, and imposing Christianity with the claim that God only recognises christians,” she added.

Dlamini does not dislike faith-based charitable groups. In fact, she works with one, World Vision. The international donor organisation has operated in Swaziland for nearly 15 years, helping to raise standards of living for a largely impoverished population.

She simply contrasts ways of achieving results. These boil down to whether a benefactor is more concerned with a personal mission than the real needs of beneficiaries.

World Vision’s public information officer, Mandla Luphondvo, explained his organisation’s success at delivering assistance to Swaziland’s poor: “It’s because we are community-based. In order to communicate, you have to be part of the community. You have to be one of them. You can’t be an ‘aid tourist’.”

Not all, but many of the World Vision staff on the ground are community members who distribute food aid to drought victims and the poor, engage in education programmes for children and youth, push abstinence in a country with the world’s highest HIV prevalence rate (42.6 percent), and assist in medical schemes by ensuring that beneficiaries receive treatment.

“Our vision is to raise the standard of living for everybody. You are accepted by the people if they know you,” says Sylvia Khumalo, another Siphofaneni community volunteer.

World Vision has contributed 15 million dollars in services to Swaziland annually, with little local publicity. Beneficiaries are unaware that the money comes from World Vision groups in the U.S., Austria, Australia, Thailand, Germany and Hong Kong. All that Swaziland’s rural poor see are neighbours attached to World Vision.

These volunteers demonstrate by example the message of Christian charity by providing home-based care to people living with AIDS, distributing food relief, and by running Neighbourhood Care Points in conjunction with the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF), to feed and educate orphans and other vulnerable children.

Their approach contrasts markedly with the methods of an American initiative, Dream for Africa, which did not fare well.

In 2004, Reverend Bruce Wilkinson came to Swaziland to announce that God had come to him in a dream, and had ordered the amiable and charismatic church leader to end hunger in Africa.

“As worthy as the goal was, no Swazi received instructions from God through a dream or any other medium instructing them to essentially turn over the country to the American. When he and his team arrived, they did not consult with Swazis, but stayed in luxury hotels to plan for us what they wanted us to do for them,” said Reverend Jabulani Dube.

Wilkinson’s American team of enthusiastic, mostly middle-aged and white volunteers descended on small rural homes, and planted small vegetable gardens. Permission was not sought from the homeowners, because the teams told them he had the approval of traditional authorities.

“I doubt if any of the Americans would like it if strangers showed up at their homes and said they had the town mayor’s approval to plant rose bushes at every house, and they start digging up the front lawn,” said Dube.

“Their target was unrealistic. They said within a year there would be no household that would go to bed on an empty stomach, just because of the house gardens. But the gardens were far too small,” said World Vision’s Luphondvo.

Members of Parliament (MPs) complained that the volunteers were taking photos of people’s kitchens, and that after the teams left, the gardens withered in drought-prone areas. Some households dug up the gardens, fearing they were infected with AIDS.

“The volunteers wore gardening gloves. The only gloves the residents had ever seen were worn by medical workers as protection against AIDS. The people made the connection, and there was no one around to explain the difference,” said Dlamini.

But Wilkinson’s Dream for Africa had ambitions far beyond household gardens. He wanted the government to give him the nation’s two largest game parks for commercial exploitation, 13,000 acres of communal Swazi Nation Land, which thousands of Swazis called their ancestral home, and the government-built factory shells in the eastern provincial capital, Siteki.

In return for receiving five percent of this small country’s landmass for free (with a guaranteed 99-year lease on his holdings), Wilkinson promised to build a village to house 60,000 orphans. UNICEF has estimated that Swaziland can anticipate an orphan population of 120,000 by 2010, over one-fifth of the population of a little more than a million, depending on AIDS deaths.

Noting that such an institution would have the same population as Mbabane, Alan Brody, UNICEF’s country representative for Swaziland, said, “Taking African children out of their communities and placing them in an ‘orphan city’, separating them from roots of family, community, nation and name, goes against fundamental and valuable African values and traditions of inclusiveness, of family, and of collective responsibility for children of the clan.”

One MP feared that the housing project contained “the seeds of future alienation and loss of identity for the children, and of conflict for the society.”

Wilkinson said the children would be taught jobs in the tourism and service industry. His plan was to build a business conference centre and luxury hotel.

The views of Swazi orphans on careers as waiters and chambermaids were never solicited. As for the local conservationists who had battled for four decades to establish game parks in the country, they were simply to be pushed aside to make way for Dream for Africa.

At the end of last year, Enterprise and Employment Minister Lutfo Dlamini made government’s decision known. “We pointed out that their approach to the problem was too radical for us to understand,” he said.

Meanwhile, organisations like World Vision continued to expand their efforts in Swaziland, introducing medicine delivery and an extended child health plan this year. Caritas, the Catholic relief organisation, has spearheaded refugee relief operations since 1976, but has vastly expanded its programmes in response to requests from a growing circle of beneficiaries.

“Wherever there is a need, we work to meet it. We are all Swazis here, and we know what we must do to assist people living with AIDS, AIDS orphans, people who don’t have enough to eat or adequate medical care, and the elderly. We have separate operations for all these needs,” said Gloria Musi, director of a Caritas initiative that focuses on home-based care.

She agreed with World Vision’s Luphondvo. “Assistance must be a cooperative venture, and not imposed. Outsiders may be motivated by charity, but they do not know what beneficiaries need more than the beneficiaries themselves, she said.

The lesson, faith-based aid workers in Swaziland noted, is that before aid operations can be accepted by beneficiaries, trust and mutual respect must be established first.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Dec 29 2005 (IPS)

How is a small country to compete in a global marketplace where size is rewarded? Case in point is tiny Swaziland, nestled between giants South Africa and Mozambique. Its neighbouring countries also have booming economies, while Swaziland is mired in its tenth year of declining economic growth.

How is a small country to compete in a global marketplace where size is rewarded? Case in point is the tiny Southern African country Swaziland, nestled between the geographic giants South Africa and Mozambique. Its neighbouring countries also have booming economies, while Swaziland is mired in its tenth year of declining economic growth.

New thinking must come into play if the little kingdom is to survive as a viable state.

“Economically, 2005 was defined as either disappointing or downright disastrous, depending on who is speaking. No one had a positive appraisal. We learned it can no longer be business as usual, because there is no such thing as business as usual in a changing world,” said Richard Dube, a public transport company owner.

The two pillars that sustained the country’s economy, textiles in the industrial sector and sugar in the agricultural sector, suffered enormous losses in 2005, resulting in massive layoffs that reversed the employment gains of the past five years.

But even ”recession proof” businesses like Dube’s bus company took a hit, when fares raised, in response to large petroleum price hikes, cut into passenger numbers.

Also, with nearly half of garment manufacturing companies closed since 2004 and thousands of workers laid off, in the sugar belt, fewer employees mean fewer riders.

“The trickle down effect of major problems in the economy’s leading sectors, impacting smaller businesses like goods suppliers and services, is spreading the misery. A new set of priorities to refocus the economy is required,” said an economist with the Central Bank of Swaziland.

The Bank reported, ”Official estimates put real GDP (gross domestic product) growth at 2.1 percent. Given the estimated population growth rate of 2.9 percent, the unimpressive economic growth implies a deterioration of the standard of living as measured by per capita income.”

The downward trend in economic performance – last year’s GDP growth was 2.9 percent – was attributed to a low growth rate in foreign direct investment, weaker performance of the manufacturing sector and low agricultural productivity.

In a country where the livelihoods of 70 percent of Swazis are tied to agriculture, the industry’s contribution to the national economy fell to 8.6 percent from 8.7 percent last year. Mining, manufacturing and construction also contributed slightly less to GDP.

Swazi exports were less attractive globally, particularly garments produced by Asian-owned clothing factories that began operations in the late 1990s to take advantage of Swaziland’s favourable trade treaties with the United States and Europe. The robust South African rand, to which the Swazi currency, the lilangeni, is linked, made Swazi exports less of the bargains they once were. The introduction of cheaper Chinese-made garments prompted the closure of some major clothing factories.

The strong rand also made Swazi sugar less competitive, at a time when the European Union said it would pay 36 percent less for sugar it is obliged to purchase from Swaziland through a treaty intended to boost the small nation’s economy.

Agriculture’s poor performance, the Central Bank reported, “exacerbated the already severe problem of high unemployment, income inequality and poverty”.

Government had hoped that the textile companies would lead the way to a new era of job creation. But the Central Bank found a reversal in the employment situation that saw tens of thousands of Swazis finding jobs in garment factories as recently as 2002.

“Accounting for the decline in job opportunities was the loss of competitiveness of Swazi products in world markets, which resulted in the closure of a number of textile companies. Employment opportunities were further undermined by limited investment in other labour-intensive industries. In addition, existing companies continued to shed some workers and to outsource non-core activities,” the bank reported.

So, economists and government planners are asking at year’s end, what is to be done?

One initiative that generated optimism this year was a ‘Job Summit’ called by King Mswati in July. To brainstorm new ideas, hundreds of representatives from the nation’s largest companies gathered at the International Trade Fair in Manzini, the commercial hub of Swaziland, located 35 kilometres east of Mbabane.

What resulted was a consensus that small and medium enterprises should be ”empowered” through access to capital. In the theory that if successful, these small Swazi businessmen and women will evolve into titans of industry, various companies pledged financial assistance.

Only after the rosy hue of good feeling that pervaded the conference had dimmed did the reality set in that financial institutions were extending credit only to qualified applicants, as they had always done, and no new pool of funding was available.

For years, government had sought to wean small landholder farmers away from strictly subsistence farming to cultivating cash crops to sell at profit through export. Until the downturn of sugar’s fortunes, peasant farmers were encouraged to form cooperatives to grow sugar cane.

”We learned that over-reliance on a single crop can be disastrous. We told farmers not to grow just one crop – maize, which is Swazis’ staple food – only to have them rely on another crop, sugar. Now we are encouraging flexibility, and more sensitivity to market demands. 2006 will see more fruits and vegetables grown, and cotton in drought-prone areas,” said Sandile Kunene, an agriculture field officer in the southern Shiselweni Region.

The same need for diversification now guides industrial growth, while retaining foreign direct investment already in the country.

“We need to attract new businesses, while keeping those already here,” said Bhekie Dlamini, chief executive officer of the Swaziland Investment Promotion Authority (SIPA).

Better road infrastructure, a more reliable power supply, and coming to grips with AIDS, which is devastating the workforce, are cited as necessities to lure investors.

”It’s a highly competitive world, and the dilemma for all small nations is to carve a niche for themselves, create a uniqueness, because they don’t have size and lots of resources in their favour,” said the Central Bank economist.

For Swaziland, that means capitalising on its own unique identity as a traditional African kingdom. From tourism (oversees visitors are being lured by a marketing campaign drawing them to ”the Royal Experience”,) to finding new uses for indigenous products û a line of cosmetics was launched by the Queen Mother and to be sold internationally are made from the local marula fruit.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Dec 29 2005 (IPS)

How is a small country to compete in a global marketplace where size is rewarded? Case in point is the tiny Southern African country Swaziland, nestled between the geographic giants South Africa and Mozambique. Its neighbouring countries also have booming economies, while Swaziland is mired in its tenth year of declining economic growth.

New thinking must come into play if the little kingdom is to survive as a viable state.

“Economically, 2005 was defined as either disappointing or downright disastrous, depending on who is speaking. No one had a positive appraisal. We learned it can no longer be business as usual, because there is no such thing as business as usual in a changing world,” said Richard Dube, a public transport company owner.

The two pillars that sustained the country’s economy, textiles in the industrial sector and sugar in the agricultural sector, suffered enormous losses in 2005, resulting in massive layoffs that reversed the employment gains of the past five years.

But even ”recession proof” businesses like Dube’s bus company took a hit, when fares raised, in response to large petroleum price hikes, cut into passenger numbers.

Also, with nearly half of garment manufacturing companies closed since 2004 and thousands of workers laid off, in the sugar belt, fewer employees mean fewer riders.

“The trickle down effect of major problems in the economy’s leading sectors, impacting smaller businesses like goods suppliers and services, is spreading the misery. A new set of priorities to refocus the economy is required,” said an economist with the Central Bank of Swaziland.

The Bank reported, ”Official estimates put real GDP (gross domestic product) growth at 2.1 percent. Given the estimated population growth rate of 2.9 percent, the unimpressive economic growth implies a deterioration of the standard of living as measured by per capita income.”

The downward trend in economic performance – last year’s GDP growth was 2.9 percent – was attributed to a low growth rate in foreign direct investment, weaker performance of the manufacturing sector and low agricultural productivity.

In a country where the livelihoods of 70 percent of Swazis are tied to agriculture, the industry’s contribution to the national economy fell to 8.6 percent from 8.7 percent last year. Mining, manufacturing and construction also contributed slightly less to GDP.

Swazi exports were less attractive globally, particularly garments produced by Asian-owned clothing factories that began operations in the late 1990s to take advantage of Swaziland’s favourable trade treaties with the United States and Europe. The robust South African rand, to which the Swazi currency, the lilangeni, is linked, made Swazi exports less of the bargains they once were. The introduction of cheaper Chinese-made garments prompted the closure of some major clothing factories.

The strong rand also made Swazi sugar less competitive, at a time when the European Union said it would pay 36 percent less for sugar it is obliged to purchase from Swaziland through a treaty intended to boost the small nation’s economy.

Agriculture’s poor performance, the Central Bank reported, “exacerbated the already severe problem of high unemployment, income inequality and poverty”.

Government had hoped that the textile companies would lead the way to a new era of job creation. But the Central Bank found a reversal in the employment situation that saw tens of thousands of Swazis finding jobs in garment factories as recently as 2002.

“Accounting for the decline in job opportunities was the loss of competitiveness of Swazi products in world markets, which resulted in the closure of a number of textile companies. Employment opportunities were further undermined by limited investment in other labour-intensive industries. In addition, existing companies continued to shed some workers and to outsource non-core activities,” the bank reported.

So, economists and government planners are asking at year’s end, what is to be done?

One initiative that generated optimism this year was a ‘Job Summit’ called by King Mswati in July. To brainstorm new ideas, hundreds of representatives from the nation’s largest companies gathered at the International Trade Fair in Manzini, the commercial hub of Swaziland, located 35 kilometres east of Mbabane.

What resulted was a consensus that small and medium enterprises should be ”empowered” through access to capital. In the theory that if successful, these small Swazi businessmen and women will evolve into titans of industry, various companies pledged financial assistance.

Only after the rosy hue of good feeling that pervaded the conference had dimmed did the reality set in that financial institutions were extending credit only to qualified applicants, as they had always done, and no new pool of funding was available.

For years, government had sought to wean small landholder farmers away from strictly subsistence farming to cultivating cash crops to sell at profit through export. Until the downturn of sugar’s fortunes, peasant farmers were encouraged to form cooperatives to grow sugar cane.

”We learned that over-reliance on a single crop can be disastrous. We told farmers not to grow just one crop – maize, which is Swazis’ staple food – only to have them rely on another crop, sugar. Now we are encouraging flexibility, and more sensitivity to market demands. 2006 will see more fruits and vegetables grown, and cotton in drought-prone areas,” said Sandile Kunene, an agriculture field officer in the southern Shiselweni Region.

The same need for diversification now guides industrial growth, while retaining foreign direct investment already in the country.

“We need to attract new businesses, while keeping those already here,” said Bhekie Dlamini, chief executive officer of the Swaziland Investment Promotion Authority (SIPA).

Better road infrastructure, a more reliable power supply, and coming to grips with AIDS, which is devastating the workforce, are cited as necessities to lure investors.

”It’s a highly competitive world, and the dilemma for all small nations is to carve a niche for themselves, create a uniqueness, because they don’t have size and lots of resources in their favour,” said the Central Bank economist.

For Swaziland, that means capitalising on its own unique identity as a traditional African kingdom. From tourism (oversees visitors are being lured by a marketing campaign drawing them to ”the Royal Experience”,) to finding new uses for indigenous products û a line of cosmetics was launched by the Queen Mother and to be sold internationally are made from the local marula fruit.

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Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Oct 27 2005 (IPS)

The plight of AIDS orphans in Swaziland, currently labouring under the world’s highest HIV prevalence rate, is an issue that demands coverage. Journalists often find themselves in a quandary concerning how best to tackle it, however.

“A child could be scarred for life by something that is written about him or her, even if the intention is to draw attention to a sorry situation in order to find assistance or a remedy,” says Sara Page, assistant director of the Southern African AIDS Information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS), a Harare-based non-governmental organisation (NGO).

According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, Swaziland’s HIV infection rate stands at 38.8 percent. About 60,000 children have been orphaned by the pandemic in this Southern African country, a number that is expected to double in the coming four years. (Swaziland’s total population is currently estimated at about 1.1 million.)

By 2010, one out of six people in the nation will be a child under the age of 15 who has lost both parents to AIDS.

“Media reports on the plight of these children that have been published in an effort to sensitise society on the seriousness of the problem, have tended to increase the trauma these children face in their lives,” says Sazikazi Thabade, an AIDS reporter for the ‘Times of Swaziland’.

This is especially true of reports that feature images of the AIDS orphans concerned – or of children who have been victims of abuse.

While the Swazi media often black out the eyes of a child in a photograph with an opaque rectangle, this has proved largely ineffectual in concealing its identity.

“It is disappointing to come across a story about a child who has been raped by a teacher, and there is an accompanying colour photo of the child in her school uniform with a small blinder placed over her eyes,” says Hlobsile Dlamini, a counselor with the Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse, which offers medical assistance and legal and psychological counseling for victims of abuse.

“With very little effort, people from its community can pinpoint the identity of the child,” Dlamini adds.

“He/she may then be a subject of ridicule to their peers, and sometimes stigma from the community because of their ordeal. This, and the follow-up reports, are more traumatizing to the child – and they are not in the public interest, as some editors may argue.”

A freelance photojournalist interviewed by IPS has noted that certain AIDS orphans even feel uncomfortable with being photographed – irrespective of the problems that may occur once the images are published.

“Kids like to have their pictures taken, but not the orphans,” said the photojournalist. “They are shy and self-conscious. They don’t want attention.”

Editors convened under the auspices of SAfAIDS and the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) recently to thrash out a policy for reporting on AIDS orphans and children who were otherwise vulnerable. (MISA is an NGO which promotes media freedom. It is active in 11 member states of the Southern African Development Community.)

According to MISA Swaziland Director Comfort Mabuza, journalists are not the only ones to blame as far as insensitive coverage of children is concerned.

“Some awareness training is still needed by non-governmental social welfare organisations themselves who deal with children, in terms of the ethical issues (about) reporting on children,” he noted.

“These organisations often feed the media sensational stories to generate sympathy and raise funds.”

Perhaps the greatest harm is done, however, by the perception that coverage of vulnerable children – insensitive or not – is largely futile.

During a recent tour by Deputy Prime Minister Albert Shabangu of community care points where orphans are given meals and school lessons, a group of children sang the following song:

The people come They take our pictures They go away and write stories But for us nothing changes.

Journalists respond that a sure way to maintaining the status quo concerning AIDS orphans is to leave their stories unreported.

But, even those who embark on this topic with the best of intentions, may find that no good deed goes unpunished.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Aug 9 2005 (IPS)

“People who don’t know me see this stylishly-dressed young woman driving a nice car, and they think, ‘Isn’t she lucky? She has a rich man as a lover to give her things’,” says Angela Shabalala as she manoeuvres her blue BMW sedan onto a highway leading to the Swazi capital, Mbabane.

In fact, the unmarried 27-year-old bank employee used her own salary to buy the car, as well as her dresses, perfumes, jewelry and chic hairstyle.

But who would give Shabalala the benefit of the doubt when the rich men she speaks of – men more popularly referred to as “sugar daddies” – are a fixture in Swazi life? Most people are accustomed to seeing wealthy, older men lavish gifts on young lovers. And, while these women might be accused of being high-class prostitutes, they are also regarded with envy.

“Sugar daddies have always been here, for as long as I can remember; but it’s getting worse because young people want a good life, but can’t afford it,” says Nonhlanhla Dlamini, director of the Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse, a non-governmental organisation that provides counseling, medical and legal assistance to abuse victims. At present, about two thirds of Swazis live below the poverty line of a dollar a day.

“When I was a child, kids didn’t compete with each other over material things the way they do now. Now if kids compete with kids from richer families, that means sex – because the only transaction that will allow these girls to get money is by having sex with sugar daddies,” Dlamini adds.

While the term “sugar daddy” has a slightly comical aspect to it, there is nothing humorous about the sexual exploitation of young women by older men in the age of AIDS. Swaziland has the world’s highest HIV prevalence, of just under 40 percent.

“When I speak with…young boys, they say their girlfriends leave them for sugar daddies, but they come back to their boyfriends because they don’t want it known that they are having relationships with older men,” says Thuli Khumalo, a nurse who counsels young people when they undergo HIV tests.

“The girls tell me they are not actually attracted to the older men, physically attracted, though some are impressed by wealth and power. They want to be seen with their peers, boyfriends their own age,” she adds. When the girls do return, they often bring the HIV virus with them, however.

“In this way, the girl can be the bearer of HIV and pass it on to the boy,” says Khumalo.

As for the sugar daddies themselves, they appear loath to place their actions under the microscope.

“I treat my girl good – I give her things. She loves me for it,” Phinda, a middle-aged bus owner, told IPS. He sees no difference between a girl having sex with him – or with a boy her own age, except “When she is with me she doesn’t starve, like she would with some penniless boy.”

Phinda admits that he does not use condoms while having sex with his lover, because he does not like them. And, he hasn’t told his wife about the affair – he does not see the need: “Swazi women understand a man has more than one woman.”

Charles, a businessman from the commercial hub of Manzini, voices similar sentiments.

“I rent a flat for my other woman, in town. When I’m with her, I’m with her. When I’m with my wife, I’m with my wife,” he says.

Some argue that sugar daddies represent a perversion of the Swazi tradition of polygamy. Others blame parents for failing to ensure that their children are less materialistic.

“People say, ‘Where are the mothers? Why aren’t proper values being taught to these girls?’ Well, they are. But there are a still influenced, seduced girls – and they seem to remain as long as there is poverty in conflict with the desire for a quick and easy good life,” says Dlamini.

“Young people want things easy, given to them. What they must learn is you can acquire your own things, and what you get for yourself you have forever. When you split with a man they can say they want their things back, but what you have earned is yours,” she notes.

Dlamini believes that Swazi women who have become successful by dint of their own efforts need to be given more prominence in the country.

“We need role models, women who stand up and say ‘I did this on my own.’ People think women get things from men: when you see a young woman driving a car, people think, ‘Oh, she got that from a man’,” she says.

In short, Swaziland needs more women like Angela Shabalala.

“My family and friends know I earned what I have through hard work. I am not afraid to live well to show other young women what you can accomplish on your own. You don’t need a rich, older lecher to get what you want,” she says.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Jul 27 2005 (IPS)

While Swaziland’s soaring HIV prevalence and the spending habits of King Mswati the Third are issues which often land the country in the headlines, problems also loom on another front: about a quarter of Swazis are currently dependent on international food aid.

Just over 100,000 tonnes of the staple food, maize, will have to be imported in the coming months, according to a crop assessment undertaken by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in April and May.

However, dealing with maize shortages will require more than a break in the prolonged drought that has plagued Swaziland – or even a steady supply of anti-retrovirals to ensure that HIV-positive farmers remain productive for longer. (Swaziland currently has the world’s highest HIV prevalence, of 38.8 percent – according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.)

"There is an urgent need to reform the country’s existing pricing and marketing policies for maize," notes the FAO/WFP report.

Others agree.

"Even with normal rainfall and an end to AIDS, the maize pricing system is discouraging subsistence farmers from becoming commercial farmers, and expanding their production," says Mandla Lushaba, a field officer with the Ministry of Agriculture. "There is no question that this country can produce more, and can consume all that it produces."

Tony Pitts, operations manager at Ngwane Mills in Matsapha – an industrial estate near the commercial hub of Manzini – says farmers are currently paid about 140 dollars per tonne of maize. This price is set by the government.

However, some say that a price of close on 165 dollars per tonne is needed for maize farming to become commercially viable.

"It is a waste to send maize to the market for nothing. Transport prices are high," farmer Amos Nkhambule told IPS. "What I grow, I grow to feed my family. That is the Swazi way, the way we have always lived. I do not trust the market."

Still, notes Pitts, "The price (of 140 dollars) is nearly double the price of maize in South Africa: 550 rand (just over 80 dollars) per tonne." As a result, the WFP and other aid agencies purchase their supplies from the neighbouring state rather than locally, to the anger of Swazi farmers.

Matters needn’t be so, says Lushaba.

"There is a reason why South African farmers can produce maize at half the price paid to Swazi farmers, who say they cannot survive on what they are paid," he notes.

"There is a need for modern production of scale – where small farms combine their fields into cooperatives for greater production – and the introduction of new hybrid seeds, irrigation to free farmers from dependence on rainfall, and education in basic business practices," Lushaba adds.

"The problem is not just the pricing and marketing of maize."

If farmers say they are paid too little for maize, consumers complain of being over charged – prompting some to point a finger at the country’s millers.

"Milling prices tend to be too high for poor households, which therefore have difficulties accessing adequate supplies," says the FAO/WFP report. Swazis pay four times more for milled maize than farmers are paid for the grain they sell to millers.

However, the National Milling Corporation, a government parastatal that sets maize meal prices, says the amount charged to consumers is a fair reflection of what it costs to mill, transport and package maize.

In the absence of agricultural reform, the prospects for maize production in this country of nearly one million do not seem especially promising.

"From a longer-term perspective, maize production in Swaziland appears to be on the decline," observes the FAO/WFP study.

Elsewhere in Southern Africa, food shortages have also been reported in a continuation of the crisis that first came to international attention three years ago.

The WFP noted earlier this month (Jul. 7) that about 10 million people in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe would require aid in the year ahead. The agency blamed regional food shortages on poor weather conditions, a lack of seed and fertilizer, poverty – and AIDS.

Southern Africa includes nine of the ten countries with the highest AIDS infection rates in the world. "In the worst-hit areas, the virus’ debilitating effects mean farmers can’t plant their land, let alone obtain seeds and fertilisers. Agricultural knowledge traditionally passed down from generation to generation is being lost," said the WFP in its Jul. 7 press statement.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Jul 15 2005 (IPS)

A new advertising campaign aimed at curtailing teenage HIV rates by promoting abstinence is using a combination of traditional and modern values in its appeal to Swazi youth.

The SiSwati phrase "Ngoba likusasa nelami" – "Because tomorrow is mine" – has been chosen as the theme of the initiative, which got underway with full-page advertisements in Swaziland’s two national newspapers.

Because of the limited circulation of the Swazi press, radio adverts are also running. In addition, billboards bearing the images and messages used in the printed adverts began appearing this month.

The pictures in question show young people bathed in the golden hues of sunrise, with quotes such as "I want to finish my education. Sex can wait." (used with the image of a girl holding schoolbooks). Another advert shows a boy with a determined gaze, saying "I am thinking of my future. Sex can wait."

"We are telling teenagers to take charge of their own lives, for the sake of both their own personal survival and for the future of the Swazi nation," creative designer Tshepo Motlhala, who developed the campaign for the National Emergency Response Committee on HIV/AIDS (NERCHA), told IPS.

Founded to distribute money obtained from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, government and private donors, NERCHA is increasingly playing the role of national coordinator for the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) it helps fund.

"The new ad campaign aimed at young people is the first time all health stakeholders came together on a single project. From initial meetings with government and NGOs, to research with teenagers, to coming up with the images and message of the campaign, all parties were involved," NERCHA’s communications director, Nana Mdluli, said in an interview with IPS.

"In the ads, we are showing young people who have taken charge of their lives. Because of AIDS, sex can be deadly. Abstinence can assure a future for teenagers."

Swaziland currently has the unenviable distinction of having the world’s highest AIDS infection rate, with the latest official figures showing 42,6 percent of sexually active adults to be HIV-positive. However, the infection rate amongst teenagers, currently 15 percent for sexually-active young people 18 years and younger, is stable, and may be diminishing.

"This is the first generation that has lived through the devastation of AIDS. They have buried friends and family members. They know they must protect themselves," says Alan Brody, country representative for the United Nations Children’s Fund.

The campaign seeks to help young people overcome pressures to have sex with peers and older partners, like "sugar daddies" and "sweet mamas" who seduce teenagers with money and gifts.

"It is a cultural departure in a society where children have always been told what to do by family and authorities, and not to think too much for themselves," says Agnes Kunene, a nurse and youth counsellor in the central commercial town of Manzini.

"But youngsters have to stand up for themselves – particularly girls. They must avoid sex for their survival," she adds. "The message from earlier campaigns to use condoms is still valid, but condom usage is erratic. Abstinence, as hard as it can be for a teenager, is the only way."

Nonetheless, traditional values still receive a mention, with teenagers being reminded that by securing their own health, they will be making an important contribution to the Swazi nation.

"The campaign’s theme of ‘me first’ is a cultural departure, but we also talk about what is at stake for the future of the country," said Motlhala.

"The teenagers in the ads are wearing Western clothes, but the language of the ads is SiSwati. We are saying there is nothing wrong with wearing Western clothes as long as you know where you’re coming from," he added.

Plans are afoot to extend the campaign beyond the traditional outlets of radio, print ads, billboards and posters. The Ministry of Education is also getting involved by sponsoring a play that dramatises the importance of delaying sex.

A hundred secondary schools will host the travelling acting troupe that is to perform the play, beginning next month. After the performance, counsellors will engage the audience in discussions.

Daniel Halperin, a behaviour change expert from the United States Agency for International Development, says that previous AIDS campaigns managed to raise awareness of the pandemic in Swaziland – but did not alter behaviour.

"Even if we were to be highly successful in expanding access to treatment and care, much of the Swazi population is doomed to a future of chronic disease unless the wave of new infections is curtailed," he notes.

"The new campaign is an important means of telling people that to continue having multiple sexual partners (means) you not only kill your future – it will kill the future of the entire Swazi nation."

But will this latest initiative succeed where others have failed? An informal survey by IPS of young people passing a campaign billboard elicited positive results.

"They dress nice. It’s a shame to look that good and die of AIDS," said Janice, a high school student.

Another girl, Ncamsile, noted: "I like the message because it says I am also a Swazi, and I have a responsibility to my people."

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Jun 25 2005 (IPS)

In the little kingdom of Swaziland, a tough animal preservation law has cut poaching by 90 percent since its enactment ten years ago, while the bloody extinction of rhino has come entirely to a halt.

"It has been a remarkable success story. Other nations have come to Swaziland to see how we do it," said veteran nature conservationist Ted Reilly, founder and director of Big Game Parks of Swaziland, a non-profit foundation that overseas three animal reserves.

One of the architects of the Game Act of 1994, Reilly saw the need for a thorough anti-poaching law after his rangers were dying in battle with poachers armed with weapons of war, and the nation’s population of rhino was dwindling to nothing.

"Hlane and Mkhaya parks are close to the Mozambique border. In the early and mid 1990s, poachers came over the border with AK-47s used in the Mozambican civil war. They were on a mission of slaughter, and their cruelty had to be seen to be believed," Reilly said.

Today, visitors to the country’s parks can view photos of mutilated rhino, which bled to death after their horns were hacked off with bush knives. The horns made their way to the Middle East, where artisans carved them into daggers, and to Asia, where apothecaries created rhino horn potions thought to cure impotency and increase men’s sexual performance.

"It is a form of sympathetic magic: like produces like. The rhino is seen to be a powerful, potent beast, so his fertility is transferred to the human user who consumes the potion. It may just be psychological, but Asia has men who swear by it," said Aaron Dlamini, an environmentalist with Green Cross, a non-governmental organisation (ngo). Dlamini has documented the history of what is now known as the Rhino Wars.

A surplus of weaponry and an absence of a powerful conservation act laid the groundwork for the wars, but the major contributor was the Big Game Park of Swaziland success at reintroducing species that had been hunted to extinction.

"Poaching returned in a big way when there was once again game to poach," Dlamini said.

According to the Game Act, rangers have been mandated by government to stop poachers, by force if necessary. Without any time of game conservation law previous to this, rangers were unable to collect evidence of poaching if this meant pursuing suspects out of the parks.

"Rangers did have guns, but they were small arms and rifles, and were no match for AK-47s," Reilly said.

The Game Act did not arm rangers with weapons of war – escalating battles was not seen as a rational way to protect wildlife and boost tourism. Rather, the Act put an emphasis on penalties as a way to stop poaching.

Defendants in poaching cases have complained that they need to hunt to survive. But most poachers are professionals who sell their trophies to butcheries. The Big Game Parks acknowledges that hunting has always been part of Swazi life, and does allow traditional hunting parties at Hlane Nature Reserve.

"What we are trying to do is to promote wildlife amongst Swazis as their precious natural heritage that must be preserved. It was shameful that the symbol of the Swazi king, the lion, was no longer in Swaziland until reintroduced in 1993. The elephant, another royal symbol, was also extinct, and was reintroduced in 1985," Reilly said.

Rangers may not otherwise take the law into their own hands. If a ranger is responsible for an injury or death, he or she is detained by law enforcement authorities for an investigation, and can be tried for aggravated assault or murder if the situation requires.

"All Southern African countries allow their rangers to take up arms to protect their game parks. Botswana, South Africa, Namibia – rangers must be armed for their safety, though mostly in self-defence against human rather than animal predators. The Swaziland Game Act is progressive because it establishes a scale of penalties for poaching depending on the rarity of the animal," Reilly said.

Since the enactment of the Game Act ten years ago, poaching of all types is only one tenth what it was in the late 1980s. Poaching of rhino has been eradicated, according to the Ministry of Tourism.

"We haven’t lost a rhino since 1992," Reilly said.

The price to be paid for undermining the act, however, is a return to untrammeled poaching, and the likely endangerment of the country’s indigenous animals.

"Our friends at Kruger Park gave us elephants, rhino and lions to restock our parks in the 1980s and 2000s, after these great animals had been hunted to extinction in Swaziland. If we lose these animals a second time, our friends will not be so generous. The national heritage of the Swazi people will be lost for good," Reilly said.

Kruger Park, located in neighbouring South Africa, is a major game park about two hours drive north of Swaziland. Reilly said that when he first proposed a game park of Swaziland to British authorities in the 1960s, when Swaziland was a British protectorate, they scoffed at the notion because of the nearness of Kruger.

Thousands of visitors have come to Swaziland to admire the very animals coveted by poachers, not only rhino, but leopard, impala, warthog, ostrich and bird species – not to mention the menagerie beyond the interest of poachers – crocodiles, hippos, zebra, and wildebeest.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, May 20 2005 (IPS)

A media scare in Swaziland about an imminent cut-off of the country’s electricity by foreign suppliers has highlighted its near-total dependence on external power sources – and jump-started contingency plans to expand domestic power production.

Debate about power supplies has also been sparked by concerns as to how the growing needs of companies will be met.

At present, about 80 percent of electricity is imported from South Africa. That supply seems stable for the foreseeable future, but additional quantities of electricity are not likely to be forthcoming. This poses a challenge to Swaziland’s plans to alleviate poverty through greater industrialisation.

In a recent communication with the Swazi Ministry of Natural Resources, South African energy giant Eskom said it would honour its contract to provide current levels of power.

"However come 2007, there will be no excess capacity to sell us. We will be limited to what we are now getting," Henry Shongwe, Swaziland’s senior energy officer, told IPS.

With South Africa importing 60 percent of goods produced in Swaziland – and with 80 percent of Swazi imports coming from South Africa – officials in the two countries agree that bilateral economic ties need to be nurtured.

However, South Africa will need all the electricity it can generate to keep pace with its own industrial requirements in the coming years – which begs the question of how Swaziland will power local economic growth.

A source at Eskom said the utility was looking into "de-mothballing" some of its shuttered electricity plants for South African use and for the export of surpluses, but acknowledged the need for all Southern African countries to eventually become self-sufficient in energy.

Hopes have been pinned on the fact that Swaziland has large deposits of coal, which might be used for domestic generation of power. At present, the country’s entire production is sold to South Africa for industrial use; but the natural resources ministry believes a coal type that has not been mined since 1997 may go some way to make up electricity shortages.

"Semi-anthracite is used for steam power generation. It is available, and can be used domestically, unlike the anthracite coal shipped out of the country," said Shongwe. Ministry sources estimate a coal-burning electricity plant could be built and running within five to seven years.

Construction of such a plant might spark concerns over the extent to which it could compromise air quality, and threaten other aspects of the environment.

But, as Charles Mavuso, a contractor who works with the Swaziland Electricity Board, points out – new power sources are a necessity for Swaziland, not a luxury.

"Southern Africans don’t need electricity to power up their iPods. We need electricity for survival," he noted.

Like the developed world, which is faced with rising petrol costs, developing nations in Southern Africa are scrambling to find renewable energy sources.

Mozambique has the advantage of the massive Cahora Bassa dam in the northeast Tete province. The fifth largest dam in the world (and the second largest in Africa), the facility is capable of generating all the electricity needed by Mozambique’s capital, Maputo. Cahora Bassa was built at the end of the colonial era and is largely owned by Portugal, but negotiations are underway to bring it under Mozambican ownership.

South Africa and Swaziland have also joined forces to build the Maguga Dam, spanning the Komati river in Swaziland near the South African border.

Electricity generation has begun at a plant attached to the dam, but the output is currently negligible. Consequently, the dam does not contribute to the main power supply (known as the base load), and is called into service only during times of peak demand.

The same holds true for the Ezulwini Hydroelectric Plant outside the Swazi capital, Mbabane, an even smaller operation.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, May 14 2005 (IPS)

When is a cow considerably more than the sum of its parts? When the animal happens to live in one of a good many developing countries, probably – not least Swaziland.

In this small Southern African state cattle are, paradoxically, both slaughtered to mark cultural events – and kept alive at all costs by owners who have grown attached to them.

“Cows are like pets to a lot of farmers – they give them names. They become sentimental, and don’t want to sell them until they are too old. They see the butcher as someone offering a mercy killing,” says Percy Mkhonta, who works as a meat cutter at a butchery in the central commercial town of Manzini.

Cows are also all-important for any man with his sights set on marriage.

The practice of paying a bride price (referred to locally as “lobola”) is still common in the country – and lobola typically comes in the form of cattle. Many cattle. While about five cows are usually needed to cover the bride price, up to 60 cows could be paid if a future spouse comes from Swaziland’s royal family (the country is Africa’s last absolute monarchy). This custom recalls earlier times when cattle were effectively the state’s national currency.

“I want to collect cattle and pay them to my fiancé’s parents. That would make me feel like a real Swazi man,” says Jabulani Dlamini, a theology student at the University of Swaziland.

“My fiancé’s family raised (her) well to be a wife and a mother – they deserve thanks. Lobola is the Swazi way. It does not matter if the year is 1805 or 2005.”

But, this age-old and widespread attachment to cattle is falling victim to economic necessity and cultural change.

“Cows are almost sacred to Swazis, but that is being re-examined. Swazi families still give their cows pet names, but now they are also seeing their cows off to slaughter,” says Andrew Thwala, a veterinarian with the Ministry of Agriculture.

“Today, the cow’s flanks and ribs are consumed in London or Munich.”

Just not at the moment, of course, as the European Union (EU) slapped a ban on Swazi beef imports last month after the country’s main abattoir apparently misplaced paperwork that EU health officials needed about vaccination histories.

Despite such hiccoughs, Swaziland’s government is trying to induce peasant farmers to move away from farming cattle for cultural or subsistence purposes only.

“We wanted to make a nation of small business people using their principal asset, cattle. To an extent we succeeded, because thousands of small cattle owners are now rearing their cows for market,” says Thwala. “Not all cows are slaughtered for the family or cultural occasions anymore.”

Adds Mkhonta, “They (peasant farmers) must take the abattoir seriously as a way to raise cash for their families.”

Accordingly, the Ministry of Agriculture has been sending officials throughout the country to preach the gospel of cattle commercialisation.

Farmers are advised to harvest manure to sell as natural fertilizer, sell healthy cattle in their prime, breed different and more profitable types of cows – and sell milk to meet local demand. In a great irony, the inhabitants of this nation of cattle devotees get their milk primarily from neighbouring South Africa.

However, government efforts to make Swazis’ relationship with their cattle deliver a bigger payoff are running into difficulties on the environmental front.

The Swaziland Environmental Authority (SEA) puts the present cattle population at 800,000 – even through the land can only support 600,000.

“We are seeing the results in soil degradation, hill erosion and desertification,” the agency adds. “There are too many cows for pastureland to handle.”

The poor quality of the grass found in about a third of the country – an area which also suffers from drought – poses further problems for farmers, contributing to the emaciation of thousands of cattle. When their owners cannot get a good price from butchers for spindly cows, many lose faith in the viability of commercial cattle ventures.

Thwala admits that in some cases, cattle farming will not enable peasant farmers to get on a firmer economic footing. Two thirds of Swazis are said to live below the poverty line.

“Raising cattle when you know they will starve is a form of animal cruelty. Fortunately, Swazis care enough about their cattle (so) they don’t want that to happen. We are detecting changing attitudes,” he notes.

And on the cultural front, the notion of lobola is also being re-examined – even by enthusiastic supporters of the practice. Dlamini acknowledges that there are more ways than one of viewing lobola, given that there is no economic basis for it any more.

“At one time it made sense: when you took a woman from her parent’s farm, you took a worker…Her contribution was valuable. The farm economy suffered (and) they deserved compensation,” he notes.

But, “That is in the past. Today, families can benefit when a daughter is wed. It’s one less mouth to feed."

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, May 5 2005 (IPS)

For a country struggling with a stubborn unemployment rate of over 40 percent, the development of small and medium-sized enterprises seems a welcome solution to joblessness.

So, it comes as no surprise that Swaziland’s minister of enterprise and employment, Lutfo Dlamini, is an enthusiastic proponent of these businesses – commonly referred to as SMEs.

“Small and medium enterprises represent a grass-roots solution to the economic downturn. They are good for poverty alleviation and local empowerment: they create jobs,” he says.

With this in mind, Dlamini hosted a large conference recently (Apr. 24 to May 1) for aspiring entrepreneurs. Over 1,000 people attended the meeting, while three major banks were on hand to explain the intricacies of applying for business loans.

Many delegates appeared to see parastatals like the Swaziland Posts and Telecommunications Corporation and the country’s water board, also represented at the conference, as potential clients.

“I want to be a supplier to the water board. They need to give business to small local firms like mine, instead of doing business all the time with big firms in (neighbouring) South Africa,” said Mary Simelane, who owns a stationary story and wants to sell office supplies to larger companies.

But, an official from the finance ministry cautions that parastatals simply aren’t in a position to welcome all comers.

“Businesses need customers, and these must come from the private sector,” the official told IPS.

During the conference subsistence farmers, who make up about 80 percent of Swaziland’s population, were advised to branch out into more exotic forms of agriculture such as cut flower cultivation and bee keeping.

Announcing a new flower export initiative of almost 27 million dollars, Dlamini said of the investors: “They have the technology, and they need local people to grow roses to support them. This is a chance for Swazis, and I would urge you to take it.”

With about two thirds of people in this Southern African country living in chronic poverty, both government and farmers have a pronounced interest in seeing initiatives like this become a success.

Once again, however, a note of caution is heard in some quarters.

“African farmers are conservative people: they prefer crops they can eat,” says Angus Quinn, a farmer who works near the north-eastern South African town of Nelspruit, and who has a long experience of commercial agriculture.

“Weaning them from subsistence farming to cash crops to be sold at markets, or even put on airplanes to Europe – the way the cut flower will go – takes more than saying, ‘Grow flowers and earn money’,” he added. Instead, a more comprehensive effort was needed to help subsistence farmers understand the new markets they were being called to enter.

Supporters of SMEs point to Swaziland’s northern neighbour, Mozambique, as an example of how rapidly the entrepreneurial drive that Quinn speaks of can develop.

“After the long civil war, Mozambique’s economic recovery began not with big reconstruction projects, but in the informal sector,” says a European diplomat stationed in the Mozambican capital, Maputo, who has observed economic development in the region.

“Mozambicans proved to be enthusiastic entrepreneurs individually. They buy and sell anything.”

In fact, these business skills may be in the process of being exported to Swaziland. A stroll through the bustling market of Manzini, Swaziland’s commercial centre, reveals that a number of the fruit vendors, watch repairmen, handicraft makers and used clothing sellers are Mozambican.

“We get these second-hand clothes from shipments that come to Maputo, and bring them here. We are showing the Swazis how it is done,” said Simeo da Silva. Only 19 years old, he is in the country “informally”, dodging immigration authorities for the chance to make a quick profit.

The popularity of Manzini’s market also serves to bolster confidence in the ability of Swazis to spot business opportunities: it is bursting at the seams, and plans were announced this week to construct a new market twice the size to accommodate vendors.

However, transforming a successful stall into a formal, tax-paying SME presents its own challenges. And, Swazi unionists such as Africa Magongo maintain that the informal sector is no substitute for a healthy formal sector.

“There are no pensions, health schemes or other benefits in the informal sector,” he says.

The organiser of the SME conference, the Manzini-based Kobla Quashie and Associates consultancy firm, hopes the event will prove a critical first step in raising entrepreneurial awareness – and educating people about pitfalls to avoid when setting up new businesses.

If only a few companies spring up as a result, every new firm will still be worth its weight in gold.

At present, profits are down a third for Swaziland’s main agricultural export, sugar, because of a decline in the world sugar price.

And, while the textile sector has grown in recent years, this too sustained a blow with the conclusion of the World Trade Organisation’s Multi-Fibre Agreement on Dec. 31, 2004: an event that has seen Chinese textiles, more competitive in price, flood the world market.

Both the big sugar estates and large clothing manufacturers have laid off thousands of workers this year, creating a ripple effect as local suppliers to those companies have had their orders cut back.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, May 3 2005 (IPS)

For years, health surveys in the wake of southern Africa’s AIDS pandemic have shown that itinerate occupations like truck drivers and seasonal agricultural workers pose a greater risk for workers of contracting and spreading HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

These occupations are opposed to jobs that do not require workers to travel or be apart from their homes for long periods of time.

But it is not scientific studies that are bringing a backlash against itinerate workers among local communities, but their own experiences witnessing AIDS’ growth.

Recently, a prominent traditional leader active in the fight against HIV/AIDS went so far as to blame truck drivers from foreign nations for the spread of the disease in Swaziland.

‘’They take advantage of the poverty in the country to entice women into sex for money or a meal,” Chief Mzweleni Dlamini told King Mswati at a meeting of local leaders in the southern Shiselweni Region.

The health ministry and HIV/AIDS groups are familiar with the problem of itinerate truckers. These drivers ply the routes from landlocked Swaziland to South Africa’s Indian Ocean port of Durban and South Africa’s industrial and commercial hub of Gauteng, who are at risk of contracting and spreading HIV.

‘’Truckers do contribute to the spread of the disease, but they are not the principal cause of Swaziland’s HIV prevalence rate, which at about 40 percent of the adult population is currently the highest of any country in the world. But it is unfair to single them out, and inaccurate to say truckers are a principal cause of infection,” said AIDS activist Sempiwe Hlope.

Chief Dlamini’s remarks that residents near the LaVumisa border post were ‘’unfortunate” because they must encounter truck drivers were criticised by local business leaders who seek to expand manufacturing and road freight in the southern region. They say Swaziland should not be singled out in a health crisis that affects all Southern African countries.

‘’I am losing too many drivers (to AIDS), but they are also South Africans, Botswanans, Zimbabweans,” Willie Stuart, president of Speedy Overborder, a trucking firm that carries packages to many nations in the 13-member Southern African Development Community (SADC), told IPS.

Truckers usually sleep in their vehicles and either entice women residing near overnight truck stops to have sex with them or pay commercial sex workers, who habituate places where truckers congregate.

While health officials are calling it discriminatory policy, the wealth community of Ezulwini, a suburb of Swaziland’s capital Mbabane, has banned construction workers hostels. The comprehensive plan for Ekuthuleni Township, which when completed will comprise of up market homes, was approved by the Ezulwini City Council with this stipulation: ‘’The contractor shall ensure that workers do not camp on site. Only watchmen will be allowed to stay on site after working hours.”

The city council demanded a plan that took into consideration the effect the construction project would have on the area’s AIDS situation.

While contractors are worried about housing and transporting their work crews – Ezulwini is home to an expanding number of the country’s luxury hotels and tourist attractions – AIDS activist see discrimination overturning a century’s tradition of workers hostels.

‘’Single sex hostels were always a necessary evil. They were unnatural environments where men had to live without wives or female companions, so they became incubators of sexually transmitted diseases when workers engaged the services of prostitutes. These sex diseases returned home with the workers, to infect wives, fiances and girlfriends,” said Gladys Simelane, who counsels people living with HIV/AIDS.

But Simelane argued that banishing hostels without alternative housing is unfair to workers.

‘’This has implications for all industries that have to house their workers in hostels. There is mining, of course, because of the large number of miners who must gather at sites located in the middle of nowhere, and agriculture, where large numbers of workers are employed only on a seasonal basis. They are also housed in same sex dormitories or camps. These groups of workers are vulnerable to HIV transmission,” Simelane said.

Like other health officials, however, she feels the answer is not to ban truckers from sleeping in their cabs, or making thousands of workers homeless by banishing hostels, but to expand HIV/AIDS prevention education, targeting also commercial sex workers who service itinerate workers.

More than 14 million people are living with HIV/AIDS across southern Africa, amounting to well over one third of people living with the virus worldwide, in an area with only two percent of the global total population, said the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Apr 20 2005 (IPS)

Passions of the heart rather than financial woes account for a growing number of suicides in Southern African nations as diverse as prosperous and well-developed South African and small, traditional Swaziland.

‘’Suicides were virtually unknown a century ago in African culture. People simply did not take their own lives,” said psychiatrist Wesley Thwala of Mbabane, Swaziland.

‘’There were less economic pressures for Africans a generation or more ago, but more importantly everyone had a strong sense of identity within a familial and community structure,” Thwala said. With the breakdown of the extended family, that sense of security and often identity was lost. People are becoming westernised in the sense that they feel more isolated and alone with no one to confide in, their emotion crises fester, grow larger, and when they are all-consuming, people opt for self-destruction, he said.

‘’People have no one to talk to. There’s no little mother or great uncle in the next hut to put things into perspective,” Thwala said.

How bad is the upswing in suicides? One of the few countries in the region to keep adequate medical data for much of its population, South Africa has traced a rise in job-related suicides among policemen and security force personnel.

Said Janis Simelane, a social worker in Nelspruit, South Africa: ‘’African soldiers used to be the most secure men in their roles, their identities, their masculinity. But disrespect for police that is a holdover from the apartheid days, when security forces enforced a state terror campaign, still lingers. This makes it much harder to do a dangerous job that requires cooperation and, yes, respect from the public.”

Less easy for suicide counsellors like Simelane to explain are teenage suicides, which are on the upswing, doubling since 1990 for children between the ages 10 and 14, according to the South African Depression and Anxiety Support Group (SADAG).

Depression is the motive for 60 percent of teenage suicides, the support group’s studies have found. Teenagers interviewed by counsellors have betrayed romantic, even glamorous notions about suicide.

‘’They want a tragic Tolstoy heroine, dramatically ending a romantic dilemma with a grand gesture of self destruction,” Simelane said.

But peer pressure in school, the need to perform well academically, socially and in sports, also contributes to teen depression that can foster suicides, SADAG reported. With six suicidal deaths per 100,000 teenagers, South Africa has the world’s eighth highest teenage suicide rate.

The most favoured method of self-destruction among South Africans is hanging. This is followed by shooting, and then death by affixation (gas) and self-immolation (burning).

In Swaziland, a small and less developed neighbour of South Africa, most suicides are performed with poison, using inexpensive weevil tablets sold for rodent control. Hanging follows as a preferred method and then death by firearm.

The news this week that eleven Swazis have taken their lives since January has made national headlines in a country with less than a half-million adults.

It is not the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare that compiles suicide statistics. It is the job of the Swaziland National Police Force to keep tabs on suicides, which they investigate as a criminal activity. People who attempt suicide and fail are arrested.

Police Assistant Superintendent Vusi Masuku said that most suicides result from troubled relationships, often between spouses or lovers.

‘’Usually, a suicide note is left behind. The person explains that he or she is having problems with their boyfriends or girlfriends, husbands or wives,” Masuku said.

In the absence of immediate family members, other means of finding emotional support are required, said Police Superintendent Lekina Magagula.

‘’We have set up a domestic Violence Unit to give people a chance to talk things over,” she said. Magagula heads the unit, which was established in the wake of an upswing in spousal and child abuse cases.

Domestic violence, like suicide, was hardly known among closely-knit Swazi society two generations ago. Most Swazis lived in family homesteads for their entire lives, rarely venturing out of their chiefdoms. Even arranged marriages were accepted by young people as the natural order of things.

‘’There was no one ‘alone’ then, because you were always surrounded by people you could talk to. There was no competition, either, the way it is today – people fighting over lovers, money, everything,” recalled Gogo Matsebula, an elderly woman who looks after three grandchildren.

‘’My daughter and her husband – the parents of the little ones I take care of – died of AIDS. I think the reason Swazis don’t want to know if they have HIV is it would depress them more, and some would kill themselves,” she said.

‘’Many people who learn they are HIV-positive contemplate suicide. They think they have an immediate death sentence from AIDS hanging over their heads. It’s not true,” said 49-year-old Sempiwe Hlope, an HIV-positive women, who founded a counselling group for other women living with HIV/AIDS.

‘’When you find that you are not alone, when you can share your burden with others who carry the same burden, you feel less lonely, you feel relieved and better,” Hlope said.

Last year the World Health Organisation (WHO) said suicide was causing almost half of all violent deaths, resulting in almost one million fatalities globally every year. The UN health agency suggested that fatalities could rise to 1.5 million by 2020.

‘’Globally, suicides represent 1.4 percent of the Global Burden of Disease, but the losses extend much further. There is, however, little information on suicide from African countries. There are estimated to be 10-20 times the number of deaths in failed suicide attempts, resulting in injury, hospitalisation, emotional and mental trauma, although no reliable data is available on its full extent,” the WHO said.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Apr 14 2005 (IPS)

Gogo (granny) Dube, a small but spry white-haired woman of 67, has had to raise five grandchildren since her daughter and son-in-law, the children’s parents, died of AIDS-related illnesses within months of each other in 2000.

‘’This is not the way my life should have happened. It is a tragedy when a parent outlives her children. It is sad when children have to grow up without parents. I’m all my grandchildren have. But it is a struggle. No money. Little food,” she related.

Dube spoke from the stoop of a mud and thatch house on the edge of a vacant, windswept field not far from the Swazi capital Mbabane. Winter is approaching in the Southern Hemisphere, and she recalled how particularly cold last winter seemed because of the sometimes empty stomachs she and her grandchildren endured.

‘’What can you do when there is no food? The children cry, and you give them water to drink to fill their bellies. But this sometimes makes the pain worse,” she said.

Dube gets no help from her husband, a 75-year-old retired school headmaster. In a country where polygamy is legal, her husband has had two other wives. One passed away. He lives with the younger wife, and the children he has with her, in another farm further south. Dube has not seen him in two years.

‘’Swazi men and their wives used to live together on the same farm. The wives and children supported each other. It was a good system. Now this custom has broken down. It is no longer polygamy. It seems like the men are practicing bigamy, with separate wives living here and there,” she said.

But at least help is on the way, in modest form from a new government initiative to help Swaziland’s elderly financially, and through other interventions of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

‘’We have lost track of the elderly in our country, because all our attention has been focused on sexually-active age groups with AIDS, and their infected or orphaned children,” said social worker Thandi Gama.

Deputy Prime Minister Albert Shabangu told IPS, ‘’Elders are revered in our culture. We must see to their needs because our older citizens are facing a situation they never expected. At this time in their lives, they had believed they could relax after a life of hard work. Instead, many grandparents have to raise young children all over again. This is after their own children have died of AIDS.”

Shabangu said that the elderly have little money or resources to return to parenting. They may lack good health, and in the absence of aid from their deceased children, they struggle to support themselves, with little hope of finding the means to clothe and school a new generation.

Financial help will be doled out to Dube and other destitute elderly Swazis under a new government scheme that sets aside about 5 million dollars in the first programme in the country’s history expressly aimed at the elderly.

‘’Our elders have always been taken care of by their families. This represents a significant shift in society, when government has to step in with a large spending programme like this,” said social worker Gama.

The money set aside for the programme in this year’s government budget is relatively small, leading social welfare officials to look to other ways to assist the elderly.

One way is mutual assistance projects and co-operative schemes, mostly involving women of all ages but including the elderly.

A report prepared by the Secretariat of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), noted, ‘’Among the majority of rural and low-income urban dwellers, women perform all domestic tasks, while many also farm and trade. They are responsible for the care of children, the sick and the elderly, in addition to performing essential social functions within their communities. Many rural and urban women belong to women-only mutual-aid societies, cooperatives and market women’s groups.”

Such organisations allow women to pool combine their monetary and labour resources to cultivate fields, produce commercial products, and create savings accounts.

Throughout Africa, such ventures can be found in Cameroon’s Corn Mill societies, where women grow maize and grind it for meal sold at markets, and the ‘’Six S” cooperative associations of Burkina Faso, which are involved in a number of money earning schemes and assist elderly women with aid and support groups.

Another one is the General Union of Cooperatives in Mozambique, which is credited with supplying most of the fruits and vegetables sold in the capital Maputo.

In Benin, an estimated 8 percent of rural women belong to formal cooperatives, but 90 percent participate in women’s savings and credit groups.

Women’s credit associations in Ghana, Tanzania, Gambia and Zimbabwe are used by 25 percent of economically active women in the non-agricultural informal sector, and the money these societies invest in businesses and farms bring returns to help the elderly group members.

Throughout Southern Africa, governments and NGOs have come to realise that the elderly can be dramatically assisted by relieving them of the burden of caring for grandchildren.

In Zambia, government and NGOs have combined with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to promote economic empowerment for elderly-headed and other households in need through programmes, training and income-generating activities, so that families who have taken in orphans are better equipped to handle the increased economic burden.

In Malawi, the international developmental organisation World Vision has helped residents of the rural Nthondo community to build ten child-care centres. These centres relieve the burden of the children’s elderly caregivers by providing food and quality time away from home devoted to educational and sports activities that give hours a day of welcomed respite for grandparents.

In Swaziland, Swazis for Positive Living (SWAPOL), founded by five HIV-positive women, uses the profits from its agricultural cooperative to assist not only AIDS orphans but also grandmothers like Dube who take care of them.

‘’If not for these grannies, our AIDS orphans would all be out on the streets of urban centres, begging and in some cases dying of exposure and malnutrition. As a nation in crisis, we owe a debt to these grannies, and we must assist them whenever we can,” said SWAPOL founder Sempiwe Hlope.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Apr 8 2005 (IPS)

Can carved masks, toy drums and grass baskets pull Swazis out of the chronic poverty that grips two-thirds of Swaziland’s population?

Ntombi Dlamini, King Mswati’s mother, is backing a new enterprise that will centralise the diversity of wood carvers and handicraft makers, and give them access to customers worldwide via the Internet. But environmentalists warn there is a price to pay: a loss of indigenous trees and their habitats.

Swazi made handicrafts will be marketed worldwide under the trademark Swaziland Trading House, Ntombi Dlamini said at the launch of a web site devoted to indigenous products.

‘’We are cutting out the middleman, and allowing our artisans to deal with buyers directly through the Internet,” said Ntombi Dlamini, who by custom considered the tiny kingdom’s co-ruler.

Dumisani Dlamini, who directs the Swaziland Trading House project, noted that in the age of HIV/AIDS, when many male household heads have been incapacitated by the disease, it has been left to women to support families.

Like Swaziland, women, whose husbands have died of the disease, have also suddenly found themselves supporting families in AIDS-ravaged Southern African nations like Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa.

Southern Africa holds two percent of the world’s population; but it has 70 percent of the world’s people living with HIV and AIDS, according to ActionAid, an international charity, whose head office is in South Africa’s commercial hub of Johannesburg. ActionAid is involved in creating awareness on the burden shouldered by women looking after people living with HIV/AIDS in the 13-nation Southern Africa Development Community (SADC).

In Swaziland and Botswana as much as 40 percent of the people are living with the virus, ActionAid says.

At the event, Dlamini said: ‘’It was mostly women who exhibited at the launch of the crafts project. This is consistent with our surveys that find women exclusively are the artisans to turn the wild grass they find in the mountains into woven mats and baskets. They are skilled in pottery making, pretty much dominating that field. We find fewer women as wood carvers.”

The women exhibited at the launch of Swaziland Trading House at the memorial museum dedicated to Mswati’s father, King Sobhuza, the founder of the modern Swazi state, about 15 kilometres east of the capital Mbabane.

Dlamini noted, ‘’This project’s aim is poverty alleviation. We have full support of government and the tourism industry. There is a growing worldwide demand for authentic indigenous handicraft.”

Swaziland’s handicraft industry has not yet become so commercialised that it produces a monotonous uniformity of product. It is still possible to find expressions of artistic individuality even in such mainstay tourist trinkets as key chains and ashtrays.

‘’Every piece I do is a masterpiece,” proclaimed Themba Shongwe, a carver of soapstone busts, which measure about 10 centimetres in height.

Dlamini said several Swazi handicraft companies already have web sites, and will link with the country’s main handicraft web site.

‘’These companies are already experienced at selling overseas. We find that a high proficiency of spoken and written English helps sales,” Dlamini said.

Raw materials are sourced locally, like a strong wild grass that grows in the mountains and when dyed is used in basket weaving. Craftspeople, who are usually impoverished rural residents, consider these materials as theirs free for the taking. They are unaware that conservation laws regulate the use of indigenous Swazi flora, much as game control laws restrict hunting of native species and provide stiff sentences for poachers.

‘’We applaud the artisan’s efforts to find livelihoods through their craft. But a balance has to be maintained between the demands of the marketplace and what nature can provide in terms of raw materials,” said an official with the environmental group Yongwe Nawe Swaziland.

Environmentalists have expressed concern that artisans are cutting down the last of Swaziland’s hardwood trees for use as carvings.

‘’These trees take more than a person’s lifetime to grow to maturity. It is illegal to cut them, but this stops no one. Once they are gone, the handicraft makers are out of business,” said environmentalist Sipho Ndwandwe.

‘’This disappearance of Swaziland’s fuel wood is imminent in some areas, while other areas face the extinction of all indigenous trees in a matter of years, based on the rate of current consumption and the new commercial exploitation of fuel woods,” said veteran nature conservationist Ted Reilly.

A study commissioned by Reilly classified the country’s indigenous trees as a non-renewable resource, many of which are in danger of extinction due to over harvesting. Endangered tree species include lead woods, knob thorns, bush willows (comretums), and umbrella trees (acacia nilotica).

‘’The ancient lead wood (combretum imberbe) in the Lubombo region has been carbon dated to be 1050 years old. Other mature trees of different species are well over 300 years old. For all intents and purposes, such ancient hardwoods can’t really be considered to be utilisable resources on a sustainable consumptive basis. They are just too slow growing to produce sustainable yields because they will not replace themselves as mature trees in the span of a man’s lifetime,” the report said.

The study found that when the value of the wood input is considered, the curios made from this product by Swazi craftspeople are ‘’grossly under valued and under priced”.

‘’As large tracts of the Kingdom are being rapidly and systematically desertified, a fuel wood crisis is developing for rural communities, and greater pressures are building on protected lands,” Reilly said.

‘’We are a vibrant, culturally rich and extremely friendly-country, and this is reflected in our products. From baskets to soap stone to hand-woven shawls, our products continue to find a niche in the world wide market,” Ntombi Dlamini.

Conservationists agree, but want sustainable, licensed of the country’s trees and other raw materials for curios.

= 04081316 ORP004 NNNN

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Apr 5 2005 (IPS)

The recent shooting death of an off-duty game ranger by poachers has reminded Southern African conservationists that the ”animal wars” that peaked during the 1990s are far from over a decade later.

”It’s all about the natural wealth of the land, from wild game to water rights to the land itself – who uses it and who owns it,” Ted Reilly, founder of the Big Game Parks system of Swaziland, told IPS.

Reilly said the game ranger who was killed by poachers got in the way of people who wished to reclaim the game parks of Southern Africa from nature conservationists, tourists and educationalists.

Some powerful political and traditional leaders in Swaziland, for example, have never been happy that vast tracts of the small country’s real estate are being used for animal conservation. To them, it is every Swazi man’s birthright to hunt indigenous animals, even though all game animals were hunted to extinction decades ago. It was the game parks, the first of which opened 40 years ago, that reintroduced the Africa menagerie to the country, first with herds of impala and zebras, and later elephant, leopard and lion.

With the need to hunt game for food a thing of the past, poachers today are in it for the money. Several butcheries in the capital Mbabane and the central commercial hub Manzini purchase game from poachers, and sell it secretly at prices well below beef and pork.

The poachers encountered by an off-duty ranger from Hlane Royal Game Park were filling their truck with dozens of carcasses of impala, wart hog and other animals shot at a remote part of the park. Animal parts were later found strewn over the area. They shot the ranger, also, whose body lay undetected for two days until other park workers happened across him.

”I knew Mandla as a friend,” said park ranger Sipho Mdluli of his slain co-worker. ”He died like a soldier, protecting the wealth of the nation.”

National political figures kept quiet about the killing, but Big Game Parks posted a large reward for information leading to the killers’ capture.

Such killings concern conservationists, for whom the Rhino Wars of the 1990s are a recent memory. From 1988 to 1992, nearly 90 percent of Swaziland’s and some other nations’ rhino populations in the region were exterminated by gangs of professional poachers armed with AK -47s. The war rifles were easy to come by, common as they were in Mozambique, South Africa and other conflict areas.

Rhino horns were in demand for use as decorative daggers in the Middle East, and as a key ingredient to potions sold in the Far East said to have aphrodisiacal powers.

To save the remaining rhinos, countries led by Swaziland enacted stiff anti-poaching laws, some which made poaching endangered species a non-bailable offence.

The tourism industry of Southern Africa was relieved when the shooting stopped at the game parks. Dozens of game rangers were slain by well-armed poachers. The commencement of another kind of animal war – with today’s poachers interested in meat of the hoof quickly converted to cash via cooperative butcheries û has them worried.

”Visitors to Southern Africa from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia û with the few also who visit from South America û are primarily interested in seeing African Big Game in the animal’s natural habitat. That leads the surveys of their interests,” said Wanda Khumalo, a travel agent in South Africa’s commercial hub of Johannesburg.

This is no time for the region’s game parks to be compromised by poaching. They are key attractions in a part of the world where tourist numbers were considered flat in 2004, going against a global trend of tourism growth.

Last year, double-digit tourism growth was the norm in every place but Europe and Africa, with Asia and the Pacific seeing 29 percent growth and the Middle East 20 percent. North and South America and Australia saw tourism rebound following travellers’ fears to go abroad in the wake of 9/11 attacks on America.

”Global tourism reached a record of 760 million international tourist arrivals and the best growth rate of the last 20 years,” said World Tourism Organisation secretary general Francesco Frangialli.

However, Africa experienced a lacklustre seven percent growth rate. There were 4.5 percent fewer tourists from Europe, usually a major source of tourism revenue.

Although some regional tour industry officials blame the high cost of travel in Southern Africa for foreigners – the South African rand has appreciated 50 percent against the U.S. dollar last year – no one is certain why the tourism boom of three years ago has waned.

”One thing is certain, we must preserve what we have, what the tourists want,” Reilly said.

This includes game animals. Happily, the gang involved in the most recent game ranger shooting have been apprehended. The suspects proved to be professional poachers involved in a syndicate to provide town butcheries with cheap game meat.

”We need to educate the public that game animals are more valuable alive than as meat in the pot. Tourists pay big money to travel half the globe to see them in beautiful natural surroundings only found in Africa,” said Reilly.

Conservationists argue that African animals spawn jobs in the tourism industry, support supplemental industries like hotels, restaurants and handicraft, and do not subtract from the environment that sustains them.

”These greedy crooks want meat and money, but they are taking away our national heritage. We only have a finite number of animals, and that is why we are enlisting the communities to be on the lookout for poachers. They are helping us,” said game ranger Mdluli.

(*corrects para 16…from World Trade Organisation secretary general Francesco Fangialli to World Tourism Organisation secretary general Francesco Frangialli.)

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Apr 4 2005 (IPS)

The recent shooting death of an off-duty game ranger by poachers has reminded Southern African conservationists that the ‘’animal wars” that peaked during the 1990s are far from over a decade later.

‘’It’s all about the natural wealth of the land, from wild game to water rights to the land itself – who uses it and who owns it,” Ted Reilly, founder of the Big Game Parks system of Swaziland, told IPS.

Reilly said the game ranger who was killed by poachers got in the way of people who wished to reclaim the game parks of Southern Africa from nature conservationists, tourists and educationalists.

Some powerful political and traditional leaders in Swaziland, for example, have never been happy that vast tracts of the small country’s real estate are being used for animal conservation. To them, it is every Swazi man’s birthright to hunt indigenous animals, even though all game animals were hunted to extinction decades ago. It was the game parks, the first of which opened 40 years ago, that reintroduced the Africa menagerie to the country, first with herds of impala and zebras, and later elephant, leopard and lion.

With the need to hunt game for food a thing of the past, poachers today are in it for the money. Several butcheries in the capital Mbabane and the central commercial hub Manzini purchase game from poachers, and sell it secretly at prices well below beef and pork.

The poachers encountered by an off-duty ranger from Hlane Royal Game Park were filling their truck with dozens of carcasses of impala, wart hog and other animals shot at a remote part of the park. Animal parts were later found strewn over the area. They shot the ranger, also, whose body lay undetected for two days until other park workers happened across him.

‘’I knew Mandla as a friend,” said park ranger Sipho Mdluli of his slain co-worker. ‘’He died like a soldier, protecting the wealth of the nation.”

National political figures kept quiet about the killing, but Big Game Parks posted a large reward for information leading to the killers’ capture.

Such killings concern conservationists, for whom the Rhino Wars of the 1990s are a recent memory. From 1988 to 1992, nearly 90 percent of Swaziland’s and some other nations’ rhino populations in the region were exterminated by gangs of professional poachers armed with AK-47s. The war rifles were easy to come by, common as they were in Mozambique, South Africa and other conflict areas.

Rhino horns were in demand for use as decorative daggers in the Middle East, and as a key ingredient to potions sold in the Far East said to have aphrodisiacal powers.

To save the remaining rhinos, countries led by Swaziland enacted stiff anti-poaching laws, some which made poaching endangered species a non-bailable offence.

The tourism industry of Southern Africa was relieved when the shooting stopped at the game parks. Dozens of game rangers were slain by well-armed poachers. The commencement of another kind of animal war – with today’s poachers interested in meat of the hoof quickly converted to cash via cooperative butcheries û has them worried.

‘’Visitors to Southern Africa from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia û with the few also who visit from South America û are primarily interested in seeing African Big Game in the animal’s natural habitat. That leads the surveys of their interests,” said Wanda Khumalo, a travel agent in South Africa’s commercial hub of Johannesburg.

This is no time for the region’s game parks to be compromised by poaching. They are key attractions in a part of the world where tourist numbers were considered flat in 2004, going against a global trend of tourism growth.

Last year, double-digit tourism growth was the norm in every place but Europe and Africa, with Asia and the Pacific seeing 29 percent growth and the Middle East 20 percent. North and South America and Australia saw tourism rebound following travellers’ fears to go abroad in the wake of 9/11 attacks on America.

‘’Global tourism reached a record of 760 million international tourist arrivals and the best growth rate of the last 20 years,” said World Trade Organisation secretary general Francesco Fangialli.

However, Africa experienced a lacklustre seven percent growth rate. There were 4.5 percent fewer tourists from Europe, usually a major source of tourism revenue.

Although some regional tour industry officials blame the high cost of travel in Southern Africa for foreigners û the South African rand has appreciated 50 percent against the U.S. dollar last year û no one is certain why the tourism boom of three years ago has waned.

‘’One thing is certain, we must preserve what we have, what the tourists want,” Reilly said.

This includes game animals. Happily, the gang involved in the most recent game ranger shooting have been apprehended. The suspects proved to be professional poachers involved in a syndicate to provide town butcheries with cheap game meat.

‘’We need to educate the public that game animals are more valuable alive than as meat in the pot. Tourists pay big money to travel half the globe to see them in beautiful natural surroundings only found in Africa,” said Reilly.

Conservationists argue that African animals spawn jobs in the tourism industry, support supplemental industries like hotels, restaurants and handicraft, and do not subtract from the environment that sustains them.

‘’These greedy crooks want meat and money, but they are taking away our national heritage. We only have a finite number of animals, and that is why we are enlisting the communities to be on the lookout for poachers. They are helping us,” said game ranger Mdluli.

= 04041649 ORP008 NNNN

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Mar 31 2005 (IPS)

Sipho Shongwe, a traditional chief who last year was appointed by King Mswati as the minister in charge of health and social welfare, sounded shocked and wounded following his first encounters with the depths of corruption in government.

Of all the acts of bribery and nepotism, kickbacks by private contractors of public funds to government officials and patronage that finds the public service bloated with officials’ family members, it was mischief at the fuel pump that set off the minister.

‘’On many occasions when the fuel consumption in a government car is compared with the kilometres the car was supposed to have travelled, there is a huge difference which shows that the car has been diverted for personal errands,’’ said Shongwe at the hand-over of two vehicles to the health ministry, gifts from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

At the same time the minister was promising the UNICEF representative that the donated cars would not be misused, former justice minister Magwagwa Mduli was regaling his colleagues in parliament with accusations that some cabinet ministers were switching registration plates on their government vehicles to get away with their use for personal matters.

Such petty corruption, well known even in the world’s richest countries, is more than an annoyance in a small, impoverished nation like Swaziland. The finance ministry two weeks ago cited the first estimation of the cost of government corruption. A private consultant found that the national treasury loses about 80 million dollars a year to various rip-offs conducted by government officials, often in collaboration with private interests.

Finance Minister Majozi Sithole broke this news to parliamentarians when he delivered his budget speech Mar. 9. ‘’The twin evils of bribery and corruption have become the order of the day in the country,’’ he said.

In a prelude to what the finance ministry hopes will be the first real attempt to address government corruption in Swaziland’s 38 years since independence, Sithole said malpractices are killing the economy by a thousand cuts. He said ‘’highly placed individuals connive with government officials to inflate contracts or even make government pay for services that were never rendered’’.

Sithole said construction projects were particularly lucrative for the corruption conspirators, though no area of public spending is immune.

Charles Ginindza, a businessman who commutes on the nation’s roads, said anyone could see there is corruption in the public works ministry, judging by the quality of the nation’s infrastructure.

‘’Roads start falling apart even before they are completed, as if they are made of sand. But the costs during construction keep going up and up, way over budget. Where does the money go? Not to quality materials, that is certain,’’ Ginindza says.

Two weeks ago the minister for public works and construction, Elijah Shongwe, made front-page news when he admitted his ministry was the most corrupt in government. But he conceded only small offences.

‘’The roads department sold bags of cement during construction of one of the local bridges, and some (workers) took bribes like goats from residents who asked them to clear space for their homes (with ministry tractors),” Shongwe said. Forget about the goats, Swazis were saying, what about the hundreds of millions of dollars over the years that allegedly went into the pockets of crooked contractors and their government cohorts?

As for government’s Central Transportation Authority (CTA), which both minister of health Shongwe and minister of transport Shongwe complained about, a bill authorising the privatisation of the facility was passed way back in 1975. But no action was taken to implement privatisation as government officials and bureaucrats for decades have allegedly stolen car parts and filled up their petrol tanks for free and with impunity.

‘’It is a matter of political will to address corruption. Otherwise, officials are just being fashionable condemning corruption as if they intend to do something about it,’’ said an Mbabane attorney and member of Lawyers for Human Rights Swaziland.

He cited government’s Anti-Corruption Unit, in operation since 1996, but which has accomplished absolutely nothing. Not a single investigation has been seen through to a conviction, in part, critics argue, because corruption is so pervasive that once prosecutions begin, they would never end, as lower-run bureaucrats finger ever-higher officials.

Finance Minister Sithole told MPs two weeks ago, ‘’I certainly look forward to the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs presenting a bill to give teeth to the Anti-corruption Unit this year.’’

A Company Bill is also ready for tabling before parliament, which will make it easier for government prosecutors to put away executives who squander their companies’ resources.

Given Swaziland’s dependence on foreign aid and donors’ increasing insistence that aid be tied to good governance rid of corruption, the justice ministry may have no choice but to promulgate such legislation.

The independent ‘Times of Swaziland’, which called corruption ‘’the country’s second currency’’, has its doubts. The newspaper implicated the finance minister himself in the illegal use of about 4.5 million dollars.

It also pointed out that the former justice minister who headed a special parliamentary investigative team on corruption which, among other things, found a former house speaker guilty of misappropriating government funds, was himself found guilty in court of election fraud.

Wrote commentator Vusi Sibisi, ‘’Those fingered in shady deals find themselves appointed to top political and other positions of authority. That is confirmation enough that corruption is an unofficial policy of government and a badge of honour for recognition and upward mobility in the Kingdom of Swaziland.’’

Sibisi doubts that national leadership has the political will to fight corruption, and echoes the views of much of civil society that only international pressure will bring reform.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Mar 28 2005 (IPS)

The custom of paying a bride price – referred to in Swaziland as “lobola” – is a longstanding tradition in this Southern African country, which is also home to Africa’s last absolute monarchy.

For certain Swazi couples, lobola is an outdated tradition. (Photo: Steve Hilton-Barber) Credit: PictureNET Africa

“Lobola is a custom completely tied to a lifestyle that no longer exists,” says social worker Sunshine Kunene.

“It is rooted in a multi-generational rural homestead. It’s from a time when Swazis would be born into one homestead, marry into a neighbouring homestead, and live their entire lives within walking distance of their place of birth.”

The life described by Kunene was still experienced by a majority of Swazis as recently as 1968, when the country achieved independence from Britain. Although British rule had lasted for 66 years, colonial authorities interfered little with Swazi customs, even allowing locals to maintain allegiance to their monarch of the time, King Sobhuza.

But, although Swazi women of 2005 – like those of 1905 – are still considered minors under the law, the status of women has evolved.

“There are problems that give some women a hard time, like turning down their husbands and boyfriends who want sex. Their inability to refuse has definitely led to more AIDS,” says a female attorney based in the commercial town of Manzini, who is also a member of the Swazi chapter of Women in Law in Southern Africa – a regional network of female lawyers. (Swaziland currently has the world’s highest HIV prevalence rate, of almost 40 percent.)

“But as for the prohibition against women owning property and signing contracts, we have found ways to get around that, and we are advising our women clients,” she adds.

Gladys Simelane, an office worker at a bank in the capital, Mbabane, agrees.

“Swazi girls are no longer just shuffling around mud huts barefoot and pregnant. Well, too many of them are pregnant – but most have individual aspirations, and more and more these don’t necessarily include marriage,” she notes.

Initially, bride price was a simple matter of transferring cattle from the groom’s family to that of the bride.

The first anthropological study of Swazis, conducted during the 1930s by researcher Hilda Kuper, stressed the economic value of a productive woman to her parents in the pre-industrial farming household which put a premium on labour. As the withdrawal of any worker from such an establishment was costly, cattle were paid to compensate parents for the loss of their daughters’ labour.

But, says the female attorney, while 80 percent of Swazis still live as peasant farmers on communal land, modern agricultural methods, like the use of tractors to plough fields, have made farmers less dependant on manual labour.

Also, “Women are not indentured servants, and lobola ‘bride price’ assumes as much,” she observes.

Simelane laughs at the notion of tying lobola to the loss of a woman’s contribution to a household.

“How would you calculate the value of the lost labour anyway?” she asks.

“Today, girls are actually a financial drain on parents. They need to be clothed, fed and schooled as children, and unless they have jobs and contribute to the household as adults, most parents are glad to see them move out after school.”

In more recent years, lobola has come to be seen as a gift of thanks from the groom to his bride’s parents for bringing her into the world, and providing her with a respectable upbringing.

“Coded in the ‘thank you’ was that the girl’s parents saw to it that her virginity was intact when she was wed,” says Kunene.

But amongst today’s generation of Swazis in their teenage years and twenties, it is more common to find children born out of wedlock than within marriage, say health and social workers. In part, this reflects the fact that births resulting from sexual abuse and incest are on the rise.

“Virginity at marriage is no longer valued, even in the age of AIDS. Some parents actually encourage their daughters to get pregnant, so the father will offer financial support. They hope to somehow get some of that money for themselves,” says Abigail Dube, a Manzini nurse who works with abused girls.

Men also appear to be querying the validity of lobola, as it presently stands.

A magistrate’s court is, this month, hearing the case of a man who divorced his wife, and wants her family to return the six cattle he paid them as lobola. Another man has petitioned traditional authorities to suspend his obligation to continue paying lobola to his wife’s family, because she is now deceased.

To be sure, traditionalists such as Jabulani Dlamini, a rural pastor, still firmly support the custom. “I am a true Swazi man, and I take it as a matter of honour to pay lobola,” he says. “It is an obligation.”

But, it may be the voices of young men such as Thulani who ultimately prevail.

“You pay lobola if a woman has not had a child, if she is pure. So, who can pay lobola?” asks the 24-year-old bus conductor, who has three girlfriends, each of whom has borne him a child.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Feb 22 2005 (IPS)

There are several reasons why women’s rights activists might welcome Swaziland’s new constitution, intended to replace the document that was suspended by King Sobhuza in 1973. Then again, there are also reasons why they might not.

Will the constitution allow women to balance rights and traditions? (Photo: Steve Hilton-Barber) Credit: PictureNET Africa

Chapter 29 of the document, devoted entirely to women’s rights, states that women and men should be treated equally, and given the same opportunities in “political, economic and social activities”.

To ensure that this is given practical effect, a third of parliamentary seats are to be reserved for women. This may also be a belated nod in the direction of the Southern African Development Community, which had set 2005 as the deadline for having 30 percent of decision-making posts in its member states occupied by women.

Once the constitution is promulgated, gone will be the days when a Swazi woman could not get a bank loan, sign a contract or own property without the sponsorship of a husband or male relative.

The draft also alters a long-standing custom whereby only a child born to a Swazi man can claim Swazi citizenship.

In addition, the new constitution relaxes abortion law slightly to permit the procedure in instances where continued pregnancy would threaten the physical or mental health of a woman. Abortion is also permitted when there is a risk of a child being born with an irreparable mental or physical handicap.

“The constitution takes seriously women’s rights,” Prince David Dlamini, the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs who headed the constitutional drafting committee, told IPS.

Concerning tribal customs, the draft says “A woman shall not be compelled to undergo or uphold any custom to which she is in conscience opposed.”

Specifically, it guards against having a woman’s relatives by marriage loot the estate of her deceased husband.

This custom has proved especially ruinous for women at a time when HIV prevalence in Swaziland is put at almost 40 percent. Women who lose their husbands to AIDS – and who might themselves be HIV-positive – can ill-afford to sacrifice an inheritance that may go some way towards compensating for the loss of a breadwinner, or subsidizing the purchase of anti-retroviral drugs.

The new constitution also outlaws forced marriage. At present, many women are obliged to marry a brother of their deceased husbands – something that has also taken a toll in the age of HIV.

“The custom of ‘kutega’, where the brother takes his dead brother’s wife, is one cause for the spread of AIDS. The widow may have been infected by her husband, or she might be infected by the brother,” says Agnes Kunene, a civics teacher in the commercial hub of Manzini.

But even as the constitution protects women from traditional practices that are incompatible with their rights, it also contains a clause which declares these customs inviolate.

This ambiguity would appear to make the draft less a passport to instant freedom for women, than the starting point for court battles in which the relative merits of modern and traditional law will have to be decided on, case by case.

“If Swazi women are not openly celebrating this (the constitution)…it may be due to the ambiguous nature of the constitution that reflects a society that is both moving progressively forward but rooted in a traditional past,” observes Kunene.

“The only way to see if the constitution’s promise can be fulfilled is to test it once it is the law of the land,” she adds.

For activists who are somewhat nervously contemplating the grey areas of the constitution there is one bright spot, says Jan Sithole – secretary-general of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions.

“In Swaziland, there are two judicial systems: the traditional courts that deal with Swazi law and custom, and the modern magistrates’ courts up to the High Court and Court of Appeal,” he told IPS. “It is the latter who will adjudicate constitutional matters, and they rule by law and not by Swazi custom.”

An attorney based in the capital, Mbabane, further notes that the determination of Swazi women to embrace new rights – however uncertain they may appear in the constitution – should not be underestimated.

“Will an unsophisticated rural girl rebel against family traditions by citing her constitutional rights? You’ll be surprised, some will. But an education campaign publicising these rights will be required,” said the attorney, a woman who has been at the forefront of redefining the role that women can play in Swaziland.

Bongekile Khumalo is one of those who might benefit from such a campaign. The 20-year-old, born in a rural area, now works with orphans in Manzini.

“The constitution? I haven’t read it,” she told IPS, without concern. “I’m not very political.”

Looking beyond the sphere of women’s rights, there are additional aspects of the draft document which have raised eyebrows amongst rights activists.

The new constitution, commissioned by the current king of Swaziland, Mswati the Third, in 1996, is being debated by parliamentarians at a time when political parties are banned in the Southern African country. Mswati’s father, King Sobhuza, outlawed these groupings when he suspended the previous constitution, (Swaziland is Africa’s last absolute monarchy).

The draft is silent on whether political parties are to be permitted in Swaziland, although it allows for freedom of assembly. However, the constitution also enables the king to suspend this and other rights when he believes it to be in the public interest. The document fails to define what the public interest might be, however.

“This has the potential for misuse in future,” Joshua Mzizi, director of the Human Rights Association of Swaziland, told IPS.

No date has been set for the conclusion of debate about the new constitution.

Even after the document is promulgated, however, discussion is likely to continue about whether it is a step in the right direction – or evidence that Swaziland still has both feet planted in the past.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Jan 21 2005 (IPS)

In May last year, IPS reported that teachers in Swaziland were at loggerheads with government over the delicate matter of admitting AIDS orphans to schools free of charge. With the new academic year looming, has the situation improved?

AIDS orphan Sibusiso Mamba: one of those who may benefit from free schooling. (Photo: Naashon Zalk) Credit: PictureNET Africa

“What everybody should know is that children are the country’s future. They should be given first priority,” she said Thursday, during a press conference.

These soothing statements aside, the issue of ensuring that AIDS orphans continue with their education is still a contentious one – no small matter in a country where about 70,000 children are said to have lost their parents to the pandemic, while still more are in need.

“It’s not just orphans who are dropping out of school, but vulnerable children who have both parents – because of lack of finances,” Pelucy Ntambirweki, acting programme coordinator in Swaziland for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), told IPS.

At the heart of the problem lies the fact that schools fear taking on students who are unable to pay fees – this despite government assurances that it will help finance the education of orphans and vulnerable children.

Last year, Simelane instructed primary and secondary school principals to admit all such children who presented themselves.

Swaziland’s Ministry of Education set aside just over three million dollars to subsidise the schooling of these children – an amount that later had to be raised to almost 6.4 million dollars.

Schools nervously complied with Simelane’s orders, their teaching staff apparently doubting government’s ability to deliver on its promise of financial aid. These fears were realised when parliament was obliged to pass a supplementary budget to release the 6.4 million dollars – something only accomplished late in the academic year.

By that time, principals who felt unable to continue educating orphans and other vulnerable children without the benefit of government funding had expelled many of these pupils. School heads even threatened to strike over the matter.

With the new academic year scheduled to begin Jan. 25, teachers remain sceptical about whether education officials will manage the subsidy process more efficiently in 2005.

“When we conducted a survey, it was discovered that some schools have still not been paid for fees for the OVC (orphans and vulnerable children), while some were only paid in part – and even then it was only at the end of the school year,” says Dominic Nxumalo, secretary general of the Swaziland National Association of Teachers. Nxumalo is also principal of St Mark’s High School, the largest public secondary school in the capital, Mbabane.

Authorities insist payment delays are a thing of the past, caused by an underestimation of the number of children in need.

The United Nations Development Programme has also stepped in with a donation of almost 840,000 dollars to help finance the schooling of these children. In addition, the U.N’s Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria contributed about 1.2 million dollars for education purposes. These funds were distributed through the National Emergency Response Committee on HIV/AIDS (NERCHA).

“The Ministry of Education gives us a list of schools and amounts to be paid, and we provide for as many children as we have a budget for from the global fund,” NERCHA Director Derek von Wissell told IPS.

“I think the ministry said for last year it was about 16,000 kids. Enrollment last year definitely increased significantly. Enrollment will be even higher this year,” he added.

Education officials say they will also be tolerant of academic failure by orphans, many of whom have been traumatized by the death of their parents.

“Inasmuch as we want these children to pass, if they fail the ministry will continue paying for their fees next year,” says Goodman Kunene, principal secretary at the Ministry of Education.

For certain children, however, the latest policies on orphans and vulnerable children have come too late. Several have lost out on years of education because fees could not be paid to keep them in school – and their return now is complicated by the considerable age differences between them and their classmates.

“Many children are not age/class-matched as they have been out of school too long, and have to be catered for in informal schools,” notes von Wissell.

These schools, called Neighbourhood Care Points, are subsidised by UNICEF and run by an adult literacy programme called Sebenta (the SiSwati word for “work”).

“Sebenta has been training care givers to teach children at the Neighbourhood Care Points, which provide basic skills to children – and pre-school education. As much as we try to keep all kids in school, some children cannot stay,” says Ntambirweki.

Beyond the immediate challenges of ensuring that vulnerable children remain within the education system, some believe that school fees themselves need to be reconsidered.

“Over the years, the setting of fees has been done by local school committees without community input or government guidelines,” Alan Brody, UNICEF’s country representative in Swaziland, told IPS.

“Fees have tended to be set by small sections of communities, usually better off, who look at higher fees to pay for better facilities. This has become problematic in the age of AIDS,” he added.

Ironically, research has shown there is no relationship between the level of fees being charged and the quality of services on offer. Institutions that charge low fees appear to provide the same type of service as schools which set high fees.

“There isn’t much difference,” says Brody. “UNICEF made a study with education officials, looking at actual operating costs. The fees charged students were all over the place, from 200 rand (about 33 dollars) to 800 rand (almost 134 dollars) per year.”

Government, communities and donors need to set up proper guidelines for fees, he adds.

For the long term, many officials and education analysts argue that the only effective way to solve Swaziland’s education problems is for government to provide universal free education. As with most countries, this Southern African nation is working to realise the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) on achieving universal primary schooling by 2015.

Eight MDGs were agreed on by global leaders at the U.N. Millennium Summit in 2000 in a bid to tackle obstacles to development around the world.

About four out of every ten adults in Swaziland are HIV-positive, giving the landlocked kingdom the unwelcome distinction of having the world’s highest HIV prevalence rate. The country is also desperately poor: two-thirds of Swazis live below the poverty line of a dollar a day.

Excerpt:

By James Hall
MBABANE, Jan 13 2005 (IPS)

South Africa’s agreement to take seriously Swaziland’s claim to its national territory has implications for all of Africa, and the pledges African countries have made to honour boundaries drawn up during the colonial era, diplomats tell IPS.

Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is amenable to border discussions. (Photo: Clement Lekanyane) Credit: PictureNET Africa

On a visit to the small landlocked kingdom of Swaziland recently, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the foreign minister of South Africa, met with Mabili Dlamini, her Swazi counterpart, and said her government would look into the border adjustment issue.

This came as a surprise to international observers, who noted that South Africa had never taken seriously Swaziland’s claim to large swatches of the giant country that surrounds her on three sides.

‘’The principals of the (defunct) Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which were adopted by the African Union member states, is that however faulty and objectionable they were, the colonial-era boundaries would be respected as inviolate. This was seen as necessary to circumvent endless haggling and even warfare between countries,’’ a Western diplomat told IPS.

But while Swaziland is an African Union member, the country’s leadership has historically bristled at the way British colonial authorities gave half the nation’s territory away to Britain’s Indian Ocean Natal colony and the Boer Republics (both in present-day South Africa) in the late 19th century.

‘’This is Swazi land, historically and culturally,’’ said Prince Khuzulwandle, brother to the king of Swaziland, Mswati III.

Mswati appointed Khuzulwandle as chairman of the government’s Border Adjustment Committee in 1994. In his yearly State of the Kingdom speech given when he opens parliament, Mswati often expresses his aspiration that all Swazis be reunited.

Because of colonial-era territorial gerrymandering, more Swazis live outside Swaziland than in the small country left behind within diminished borders.

The territory Swaziland wants back is divided into three sections. Located in South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province to the west, KaNgwane extends up to 40 km from Swaziland’s west to northeast border, fitting like a cap over the country’s northern area.

To the east, also in present-day South Africa, Ngavuma, if reacquired by Swaziland, would once again reunite geographically the kingdom with the Indian Ocean. Swaziland would no longer be a landlocked country, but would encompass what is now South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province south from the Mozambique border to Lake Sibaya.

A final 65 km by 30 km curved strip of land, the Nsikazi Area, is not contiguous with Swaziland or the other disputed lands. Described by one diplomat as ‘’floating like an island of Swazidom’’, the strip extends north from the White River in South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province. ‘’This land rightfully belongs to Swazis,’’ Khuzulwandle said. ‘’We have waited over a century to bring our brothers and sisters back into the fold under their king.’’

An official with the South African foreign ministry told IPS last year, ‘’Several tribes and countries are making claims to South African territory, not just the Swazis. Some have more legitimate arguments than the Swazis. But if we were to make concessions to the Swazis, it would not end there because of the other people’s claims.’’

So, why the apparent change of policy? The South African mission to Swaziland commented no further than to say that no committee has yet been set up and the idea of doing so is in the preliminary stage.

One suggestion raised by foreign observers is that South Africa, for purposes of bilateral friendship, wishes to be seen by Mswati as seriously considering a matter the Swazi leadership has considered critical for decades.

South Africa is important to Swaziland, a tiny kingdom with a population of 1.1 million. Sixty percent of Swazi exports including all of its coal are sold to South Africa and Swaziland imports 80 percent of its goods and services, including all petroleum products, from South Africa.

In a rare display of public pique for royal diplomats, who are usually noted for their discretion, Khuzulwandle two years ago expressed his disappointment with South African President Thabo Mbeki for ignoring his committee.

Subsequent behind the scenes complaints, which persisted during high level bi-lateral meetings, may have prompted South Africa’s foreign minister to bring the Swazi government the news they wished to hear on her recent state visit to the kingdom.

Whether the pledge will lead to actual border adjustment negotiations remains to be seen.

Millions of South Africans would become Swazi citizens if the disputed territories are returned to Swaziland.

The Border Adjustment Committee has not yet had government-to-government talks, but has met with Swazi chiefs in South Africa who still retain their traditional roles. Khuzulwandle told the Swazi press that the South African chiefs were receptive to the re-incorporation idea.

During the 19th century, Swazis never militarily confronted the British colonialists. Instead, Swazi warriors assisted the British to defeat ethnic groups like the Pedi who were troubling the colonialists. Consequently, the British did not dismantle Swazi leadership, the way they subjugated the Zulu under the Natal Colonial government. Swaziland became a British protectorate, and Swazis retained their national identity in tact until independence in 1968.

But individual British miners and Boer farmers (Dutch settlers) laid claim to Swazi territory in the late 19th century. Paul Kruger, president of the Boer Republics, even claimed that he was the rightful ‘’King of the Swazis’’ because he could transform the territory by laying a rail line from Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, to the Indian Ocean, after annexing Swaziland first.

From the time of his coronation in 1921, King Sobhuza, Mswati’s father, continuously sought territorial reunification. He found an unlikely ally in South Africa’s apartheid regime. Desirous to show the world it had an ally in a black African state, Pretoria cooperated in the border adjustment issue. The plan was to make Swaziland a kind of ‘’Bantustan’’; a ‘’homeland’’ where all South African Swazis would become citizens, wherever they lived in South Africa.

As was the case with other tribal homelands of the time (which were never recognised by the international community), this would have made South African Swazis legal aliens in the country of their birth, and would have made it easier for authorities to control their travel, employment and residency.

By 1982, an agreement had been finalised, but resistance from South Africa’s KwaZulu legislature scuttled the deal. King Sobhuza died weeks later. His life’s dream now may have been resuscitated by the Mbeki administration’s decision to consider Swaziland’s border adjustment claim.

Excerpt: