[LINK] "Rolls-Royce Riding Swazi King Gets Pay Rise as Cuts Stoke Rage"

[rfmcdonald]

The situation in Swaziland, as described by Bloomberg and by other sources I've read, is as pre-revolutionary as any, with the intersection of economic difficulties and a "Let them eat cake" attitude from the absolute monarch on the top of the situation, all in a small country that's virtually an enclave of a far more democratic South Africa.

King Mswati III has a Rolls Royce, 13 palaces and 14 wives, and just received a pay increase, even as a cash crisis forced Swaziland to slash spending, feeding anger against his regime.

With the government freezing state wages and imposing higher taxes to fight the country’s worst-ever fiscal crisis, the nation’s five biggest labor groups plan “mass protests” today in the capital, Mbabane.

The unions want change in sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy as a 20 percent drop in recurrent state spending threatens to drive up a 43 percent jobless rate and push thousands of people in Africa’s third-largest sugar producer to search for work in neighboring South Africa. The king was awarded a 24 percent rise in his budget allocation.

“The anger will help speed up the process of change,” Vincent Dlamini, Deputy Secretary General of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions, said in an interview in Mbabane on Feb. 14. “We’ve seen the people of Tunisia and Egypt. They are essentially monarchies too. That can happen here as long as people consistently mobilize.”

The Congress of South African Trade Unions, the country’s biggest labor union federation with about two million members, backed the protests, calling for an end to “the intensified state of terror enforced by the royal regime and its security forces,” it said in a March 16 e-mailed statement. Swazi workers are employed in South African mines and other industries.

[. . .]

Mswati is the nation’s second ruler since independence from Britain in 1968 and the 42-year-old will celebrate a quarter of a century in power in April. The king appoints the prime minister and lawmakers aren’t allowed to belong to a political party. Security forces have quashed opposition protests during 32 years of emergency rule. In September, they “arbitrarily detained, assaulted and intimidated” human rights activists, Amnesty International said on its website.

The monarch clings to past rituals, including an annual reed dance in which bare-breasted virgins vie for his attention, and to possibly become his new wife.

At an annual praise-giving at one of the sovereign’s palaces on Feb. 12, about 2,000 women dressed in colorful fabrics sang and danced with rattles strapped to their ankles. With three burgundy feathers sticking in his hair, wearing a traditional red toga-like garment and flanked by his mother, Mswati surveyed his subjects while accepting gifts of marula wine, a homebrew made from a small round fruit.

This, and the other festivities which eulogize Mswati, are an insult to Swazis, over two-thirds of whom live on less than $2 a day, according to labor leader Dlamini.

“If your father said he has no money to pay your school fees and then he throws a massive birthday party for himself with champagne for everyone, what would you think?” he said.

Go, read. A Swazi republic would be far from being the worst thing in the world.