Elections have been prominent in African news of late. Last year saw a deeply flawed Nigerian poll return a new president. This year has begun with a flood of stories about the bloody mayhem in Kenya. It takes little courage to predict that the electoral focus will soon shift to Zimbabwe.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the parliamentary elections due later this year in Swaziland have drawn little attention, nor is it likely that this will change as polling day approaches. Nevertheless, there are structural tensions within the kingdom’s social and economic fabric which, sooner or later, will test the political framework at the national and local levels.
In 1973, King Sobhuza II suspended the country’s constitution after a minor parliamentary challenge to the absolute authority of the monarchy. Almost 30 years passed before his son, King Mswati III, allowed the formation of a committee to examine the possibility of opening the political space to greater public participation. In the meantime, a neotraditional system of government dominated a parliament chosen largely through a system of individual and localised elections supervised by traditional authorities.
The principal beneficiaries of this modified absolutism, politically and materially, were the extensive royal family, their courtiers and the rural chiefs, a situation which prompted increasing opposition from civil society and student and trade union activists, supported by foreign allies.
Swaziland’s new constitution was promulgated in 2006, following seve-ral years of national consultations and a farcical series of events in which nobody, including the King, appeared to know when it would come into effect. More to the point, there was no clarity as to whether the new dispensation, in which the royal courts remained dominant, would allow for political parties to contest the 60 elected seats in the 76-member House of Assembly.
The new constitution included a bill of rights which allows for freedom of association, but whether this included the right to form political parties, proscribed under a 1973 royal decree, remained moot. Attempts by civil society organisations to have this right affirmed by the judiciary were rebuffed, and the matter is now on appeal in the Supreme Court.
Pseudo-political parties have begun to prepare themselves for the possibility of being allowed to compete at the polls, though most of these parties might be qualified as moderate royalist modernisers rather than convinced democrats.
Last weekend, a group of civil society and political organisations held a meeting in Manzini at which they pledged to boycott the electoral process until multiparty elections are introduced. They have decided to form a united front by April, when they will adopt a name and organisational rules. This will be the first time a common position has been attempted since the collapse of the Swaziland Democratic Alliance in 2003.
It would be premature to expect too much from the democratic push, however. The Swaziland trade union movement, which led the earlier drive for constitutional rule, is badly fractured.
In any event, although the conspicuous consumption of the Swazi royal house has created a broader popular unease in the kingdom of late, there is little evidence to suggest that the democrats’ followers are as yet as numerous as they claim. It seems more probable that such progress as can be made in curbing the royal prerogative and moving towards more accountable and efficient government will depend for now on developments within the ranks of the ”loyal reformists”.
Even they will have their work cut out, however, for there are powerful entrenched forces determined to thwart any dilution of neotraditional authority.
Yet unless Swaziland’s government can break free of the inertia born of its scelerotic political condition, the problems of economic reform, particularly in a rural sector unable to feed its own people, and in a macro-economic environment both financially and fiscally hostile, there can be no serious attempt to address the dangerous problems of increasing impoverishment among the majority.
Sooner rather than later, this could indeed lead to an unprecedented destabilising response from a peasantry whose loyalty to the present system is so blithely assumed.
Richard Cornwell is a senior research associate at the Institute for Security Studies