King Mswati III receives visit from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, September 5, 2023 (AP Photo)
Among the most useless in the world: Today 59 representatives are elected in Eswatini, whose only power is to advise the king
Today, Friday September 29, general elections are taking place in Eswatini, a small state between South Africa and Mozambique that was known as Swaziland until five years ago. Around 590,000 registered voters (out of a total population of 1.2 million) will elect 59 representatives to the country’s lower house. These deputies are not allowed to belong to any political party and only have the power to advise the king. Eswatini is effectively the only remaining absolute monarchy in Africa and has been ruled by King Mswati III since 1986 without any concessions to democracy. guided. There are numerous autocratically ruled countries that use elections as a simple “front” ritual, but Eswatini’s electoral process remains one of the most useless in the world.
On paper, Eswatini has a parliamentary system, but representatives in the House of Representatives have no real power other than electing ten senators. However, the king simultaneously appointed twenty of them, thereby making the Senate, the body that was theoretically supposed to hold legislative power, also his emanation. In the most recent appointments, six of Mswati III’s twenty were. Senators nominated his relatives. Additionally, the king is above the constitution, has the power to repeal any law he doesn’t like, and can dissolve parliament. He appoints the prime minister and the government, controls the police and armed forces, and has suppressed dissent in all forms, including violence, over the nearly forty years of his rule, as denounced by Amnesty International, among others.
An independent state since 1968 (it was previously a British colony), Eswatini is about half the size of Belgium and 60 percent of its population lives on less than $2 a day.
Voters can choose on Friday from a list of candidates that was determined in the primaries on August 26: Only a few of the prospective MPs are openly opposed to the king and his government, and none are part of a political party. The existence of parties is permitted, but their members are not allowed to take part in elections. The main opposition party, the United Democratic People’s Movement (Pudemo), was declared a terrorist organization in 2010 and subsequently disbanded. Two of the opposition MPs elected in 2018 are currently in prison and a third is in exile. The main opposition groups have called on voters to boycott the elections: the full results of the last two elections in 2013 and 2018 were never published.
In the face of such obviously useless and absurd elections, a large protest movement developed in 2021, resulting in long and well-attended demonstrations, which were, however, violently repressed by the army: it is estimated that over 40 people were killed in the clashes. Meanwhile, a curfew was imposed and internet access was blocked.
In January of this year, civil rights lawyer Thulani Rudolf Maseko, one of the most prominent opposition figures, was killed by a commando outside his home. A few hours earlier, King Mswati III. indirectly announced the execution: “Some people should not cry and complain when a mercenary kills them: these people started the violence.”
King Mswati III during a traditional ceremony (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe, File)
Mswati is one of the last children of Sobhuza II, the first king of Swaziland after independence from the United Kingdom: when her father died, she was only 14 years old and one of 210 children fathered by the king with 70 different women ( according to the country’s official sources). Through a traditional and complex inheritance law, it was up to him to succeed him.
He studied in the United Kingdom until he was officially crowned at the age of 18, becoming the world’s youngest ruler. Mswati is quite well known abroad as he usually wears traditional clothing at official meetings and has a great passion for luxury cars and watches. He buys them compulsively, despite the great poverty of his kingdom: he once bought 19 different Rolls Royces for his 15 wives.
Although he imposed moral and behavioral rules inspired by Catholic fundamentalism on his subjects, he has maintained the tradition of polygamy: he currently has 15 wives and 36 children. In order to curb the spread of the HIV virus and thus AIDS (Eswatini has one of the highest proportions of people testing positive in the world), a law was passed in 2005 that required chastity until the age of 18. A few months later he violated this by marrying a 17-year-old girl: he punished himself by paying a cow as a fine.
The first discussions to begin Swaziland’s independence process in 1963 (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
However, Mswati III’s entire style of government is particularly burdensome for the economy of her own state: the royal family’s spending budget weighs tens of millions of dollars every year, in a state where 60 percent of the population lives below the extreme poverty line. Corruption and human rights abuses are widely reported, but any form of dissent is prosecuted, including arbitrary detention and, in some cases, extrajudicial killings.
Mswati advocates and promotes anti-scientific practices and severely restricts women’s rights. His power is in no way balanced and his every decision, even the most irrational, becomes the law. For example, on his fiftieth birthday, he decided to change the name of the country because, in his opinion, Swaziland was too often “confused” abroad “with Switzerland” (Switzerland, in English): from then on the name Eswatini was introduced (country the Swazis, but in the local language).
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