By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Jul 31 2012 (IPS)

Swazis should not see the ongoing nationwide one-month teachers’ strike as a movement capable of overthrowing the political regime here, despite the fact that civil servants and nurses have joined the action, according to political analyst Dr. Sikelela Dlamini.

Since Jun. 21, teachers in this southern African monarchy have engaged in an indefinite strike demanding a 4.5 percent cost of living increase, which has left thousands of pupils in about 30 to 50 percent of the country’s 179 secondary schools and 153 primary schools without teachers.

The country’s National Association of Public Servants and Allied Workers Union has also since joined the strike, although over 70 percent of its members are at work, and the Swaziland Democratic Nurses Union is engaged in a go-slow after the government won an interdict in the country’s Industrial Court against full-blown strike action on Jul. 19.

While strikers have mainly protested against the government’s move to freeze all public servant salaries, on numerous occasions the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) president Sibongile Mazibuko warned that if the government refused to give workers the 4.5 percent cost of living adjustment, which is below the inflation rate, “the government might end up losing the country.”

The inflation rate currently stands at 9.43 percent, which has made it difficult for the 63 percent of Swazis living below the poverty line of two dollars a day to put food on the table.

But Dlamini and other analysts feel that the struggle for democracy in Swaziland lacks clear political alliances between labour and political organisations.

Dlamini told IPS that Swazis should not read too much into the teachers’ strike because workers have not yet declared their regime-change agenda at the negotiating table. In addition, only just over half of SNAT’s 9,000 members are on strike.

“No amount of all-out protest and defiance on the part of labour alone is sufficient to topple the status quo without a clear political direction,” Dlamini told IPS.

While workers are in a strategic position to challenge King Mswati III’s regime because they can withhold the labour that fuels the economy, Dlamini said that the country needs political organisations to negotiate and contest power.

Political parties have been banned in Swaziland for almost four decades and King Mswati III’s government continues to use security forces to quash any political dissent spearheaded by trade unions.

Following the fiscal crisis that has hit the country since 2009, after a 60 percent decrease from Southern African Customs Union income, workers began to call for political change, better working conditions, and below-inflation salary increases.

A United Nations Impact of the Fiscal Crisis in Swaziland survey released on Mar. 16 said that 21.9 percent of surveyed households have experienced reduced income since the crisis hit in 2009. And about seven percent of households surveyed admitted to having a member who lost a job as many families here survive on a meal a day.

The government has said that there is no money to pay public workers, whose salaries constitute a significant 52 percent of the national budget. Last year, the cash-strapped country took out a 320-million-dollar loan with neighbour South Africa. And at the time, the International Monetary Fund advised the Swazi government to reduce public servants’ salaries by 4.5 percent and politicians’ salaries by 10 percent, to save the government 24 million dollars a year.

However, the government has refused to adhere to calls demanding the cancellation of the controversial Circular No. 1, a government gazette that awards politicians, including the prime minister, cabinet ministers and members of parliament, lucrative perks. The government also continues to spend, and has plans to purchase 800 new cars over five years.

In addition, Mswati, Africa’s last absolute monarch, who has 13 wives, has also been criticised for his lavish lifestyle. The South African Mail & Guardian newspaper reported on Jul. 25 that three of the monarch’s wives are to soon go on holiday to Las Vegas, in the United States, with a 66-member retinue.

“We want a competitive government that will care about ordinary people instead of only those in power,” Mazibuko told IPS.

The government has responded to the strike by cutting the striking teachers’ July salaries by a third. It said that this was done because the strike is illegal as the Industrial Court recently ruled against it. However, teachers remain on strike.

But South African-based socio-economic analyst Thembinkosi Dlamini told IPS that civil society organisations in Swaziland, particularly labour unions, are weak and not very well coordinated to challenge the regime.

“The state has also made frantic efforts to dismantle any form of collective effort that could bring pressure to bear on the system,” said Dlamini.

For instance, in March the government registered the Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA), only to deregister it in April after stating that there is no legislation governing the merger of trade union federations here.

Trade unions felt that the government was trying to weaken the labour movement by deregistering TUCOSWA so that there could be no unity among workers, which could lead to them protesting against the government.

Meanwhile parents and public school pupils, who are supposed to be sitting for their mid-year examinations, are the ones most affected by the labour action, said human rights activist Doo Aphane. Some children do not even attend class currently, which exposes them to all sorts of risks, including sexual abuse and drug use, Aphane told IPS.

“Our government lacks a human rights-based approach because it is clear that the government has not taken into consideration the plight of the many ordinary people who are suffering because of this strike,” said Aphane.

Prime Minister Sibusiso Barnabas Dlamini has threatened to fire striking teachers and close down schools if the strike continues. He has maintained that public servants will not receive a salary increase for the next three years.

“This does not guarantee lessons for the children who have been idling for weeks now,” the director of Save the Children Swaziland, Dumisani Mnisi, told IPS. “I wish that the government and teachers could sit down and sort out their differences so that children do not suffer the consequences of the action.”

A director of one of the country’s civil society organisations, who asked for anonymity, said that the prime minister was not handling the matter well and was “very arrogant because he is the King’s appointee and he has nothing to lose even when the public complains about his conduct.”

“Since the strike started we’ve been trying to get an appointment to engage the prime minister, but he’s been refusing to see us,” he said. “He seems to be only interested in fixing up the teachers and not ensuring that the children receive an education.”

He said that the government’s decision to buy cars to the value of 2.4 million dollars when it claimed that there was no money for workers showed how insensitive those in power were.

“That’s why people are now calling for a system that will ensure that those serving in the government take the citizens seriously,” he said.

Analysts insist though that it will take more than a group of aggrieved workers and empty threats to bring about political change in Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy.

The Moroccan government’s announcement that it would issue new public media guidelines at the end of May has reignited a stormy debate around independent media in the kingdom.

The debate began nearly two months ago when the Islamist government, led by Abdelilah Benkirane, forced public television channels and radio stations to broadcast the five daily calls to prayer, which put many citizens on the defensive against what they saw as a deliberate attempt to Islamise an otherwise moderate sector of society.

The new law was supposedly imposed in an effort to decrease the prevalence of the French language in favour of Arabic, though experts and activists were quick to point out that the government did not pay nearly as much attention to broadcasting Amazigh, the original language of the country, over the airwaves.

For years, the 6th public television channel, as well as the public radio station ‘Mohammed VI for Saint Koran’, have been completely dedicated to religious issues 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Following his ascension to the throne in 1999, King Mohamed VI jumped headlong into this debate by announcing his “project of the modernist and democratic society”, supposedly aimed at curbing the presence of extremist Islam in the public realm.

The King, who approved a new constitution on July 1 last year that grants the monarch substantial powers of arbitration, has come under fire for dishing out an inadequate response to the complicated debate.

Last month, his new head of government, Abdelilah Benkirane of the Justice and Development Party (PJD), declared that the old, ‘Islamised’ guidelines were not set in stone and could consequently be amended.

The controversial law was scrapped, sparking scattered debate around the complicated issue of media in Morocco.

‘Islamisation’ a hurdle to democracy?

Fayçal Laâraichi, director of the country’s national broadcasting corporation, SNRT, told the daily ‘Al Ahdath Al Maghribia’ newspaper last month, “The independence of the public media is sacred.”

Laâraichi warned that the new manuals have to respect “openness, pluralism, linguistic diversity and the national identity”, all enshrined in the country’s constitution.

But his reaction has been criticised as having its own agenda.

“There are (some professionals) who stereotype Islamists as a threat to openness and modernity,” Ismail Azzam, a columnist for the local Hespress magazine, told IPS.

Moulay Touhami Bahtat, editor-in-chief of the local ‘Assdae’ (‘Echoes’) publication, believes, “Saying that the Islamists use the public media to Islamise (our) society reveals a blatant ignorance of the (situation).”

According to him, “The reality is that the public media was always an island completely separated from its environment, whose (practitioners) continue to act as if satellite dishes do not exist.”

Citizens have long lamented the poor quality of programmes on public TV, while management of the public media has been under close scrutiny since “official reports from the Supreme Court indicated very grave financial gaps (in the media’s accounts). The people in charge of the public media not only have to leave, but must be judged” on the issue of corruption, Azzam said.

The real fight, according to him, is not between Islamists and modernists, but between good governance and mismanagement. “Even if there were a leftist government, the opponents of the reform would have accused it of secularising the public media,” he explained.

Abdessalam Benaissa, a prominent writer, commented in Hespress last month, “the suspension of the manuals (by Benkirane) without so much as informing citizens means that the first experience within the framework of the new constitution, namely the right of citizens to information, has just been violated.”

He is not alone in this critique. “The intervention of the palace in the affair of the media manuals was expected because we are not still at the stage of a parliamentary monarchy,” Azzam commented, referring to the core demand of the February 20^th movement, for a separation of powers between the monarch and the government.

Benkirane, who was then the leader of the Islamist opposition, opposed the movement and stubbornly defended executive powers for the monarch.

“The head of the government shows courage only against unemployed graduates,” commented Azzam ironically, hinting at the violent police interventions against demonstrations by unemployed youth.

According to him, Benkirane benefits greatly from the current political order, in which the monarch retains several executive powers and Benkirane himself has a great deal of authority.

A governmental committee, chaired by the minister of housing and former minister of communications, Mohammed Nabil Benabdellah, is now in charge of establishing new media guidelines, which will be released no later than the end of this month.

The government is bound by law to establish media guidelines and submit them to the High Authority of Communications and the Audiovisual sector (HACA), which ratifies the new rules before making them public on an official bulletin board.

Though the new guidelines have already been ratified, Fatiha Aarour, a HACA representative, told IPS, “Professional secrecy forbids us from speaking to the press about this issue.”

(END)