Africa’s last monarch King Mswati III of Swaziland reportedly has cancelled plans for a “silver jubilee” (estimated to be 1.2 million euros) amid warning from the IMF that the landlocked kingdom is teetering on financial collapse. Well, the truth is that King Mswati needs to cancel many things, including:
• He should unban political parties, which his late father King Sobhuza II banned in 1973 in the name of unity. Currently Mswati has absolute power, and appoints the prime minister and cabinet, all judges, two-thirds of the upper house, 15 per cent of the lower house, and is commander in chief of the armed forces.
• He should stop using the annual ‘Umhlanga” or reed dance (in which thousands of chanting bare-breasted-maidens are paraded before him) as a platform to pick an additional wife.
• He should put a stop to the royal family’s affluent and lavish life style, which is in a stark contrast with the reality that the country is faced with the challenges poverty, hunger, unemployment, drought, HIV-Aids epidemic, and tuberculosis.
