IMAGINE FOR ONCE YOU ARE BHEKA MAGAGULA. JUST IMAGINE!!

........ The Silent fall of a maligned and forgotten officer betrayed by both sides

When Bheka Magagula first joined the Eswatini Correctional Services, he saw the uniform as more than a job. It was a calling. Born into poverty in the dusty streets of Nhlangano, he knew the hardship of life, and he believed that by joining the Correctional Services, he could serve his country and make a difference. Yet as the years wore on, the institution he once revered became a cage of its own—a place where officers like him were underpaid, overworked, and treated with disdain for merely speaking the truth.

Magagula had never been a revolutionary. He didn’t attend political rallies or advocate for change on social media. But he had something that set him apart from the others—he had a voice. And he used it, not for political gain but to speak out on behalf of his fellow officers. He argued for better pay and improved working conditions, but for that, he was labeled a progressive, an agitator, a man to be watched merely for suggesting that workers needed to be unionised and burgain collectively. Bheka told us all this in the many Facebook 'lives' as a show that his belief in social justice predates the uprising and is rooted in his own conviction of justice and fairness.


“Progressive,” they called him, as though wanting to feed your family was a political act. Every day, he was reminded of that label. They said it in whispers in the break room, they said it in the way promotions passed him by, and they said it in the cold stares from his superiors. But Bheka wasn’t progressive; he was just hungry, frustrated, and tired of being treated like less than a man. But security officers in eSwatini have no voice. They must do as they are told. Yes sir!!


The Bloody Uprising

Then 2021 came, and with it, a tide of chaos. Bheka watched as protests erupted across the kingdom. He had heard the rumblings on the streets, felt the tension simmering in the air. People were fed up with King Mswati III’s government—decades of repression, economic hardships, and the curtailing of political freedoms had finally pushed the people to their breaking point. What began as peaceful protests quickly spiraled into chaos.

Bheka's own colleagues were called in to "restore order"—a euphemism for what would turn into bloodshed. They returned from the field, their uniforms splattered with the blood of their fellow countrymen, joking about how many "rebels" they had gunned down.

It wasn’t just the blood on their hands that sickened Bheki; it was the way they spoke about it—so casually, so carelessly. Again Bheka told us all this on Facebook as if knowing he needed to tell his life story himself before his enemies—both within the state and progressives— told lies about him.


“They’re not people,” one of his fellow officers said, chuckling as he wiped blood from his baton. “They’re just progressives. We did what we had to do.”

The words echoed in Bheka's mind for days. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t shake the horror of what he had witnessed. Then, one night, scrolling through social media, he saw the faces of the dead. He saw the way their families grieved publicly, their cries for justice falling on deaf ears. And then, he saw something that broke him entirely: photos of his colleagues—men he had trained with, men he had once called brothers—doing what he never thought would happen in a country he swore was peaceful and "one family". 

That was the moment Bheka knew he couldn’t stay. He had a family—a wife, young children, and a secure job—but none of that mattered anymore. He couldn’t be part of a system that brutalized its own people. And so, with a heavy heart and a mind clouded with anger and grief, Bheka made the decision to leave it all behind.


A Leap into the Unknown

He had read about the leaders of the "Swazi revolution" online—shadowy figures who promised change, promised a future where people like him wouldn’t be oppressed by the system. To him they were brave. They spoke his language of justice and fairness. They aroused a deep sense of patriotism in its true definition. They were underground, of course, hiding in exile after the government labeled them terrorists and drove them out of the country.

Bheka didn’t know these people personally, but he knew their cause. He never knew their sincerity to the cause, their ethics, their integrity or their sense of compassion and empathy. But he believed in their bona fides. He believed in them. Without telling his family, he slipped away in the dead of night, crossing the border into South Africa, where he hoped to find refuge among the revolutionaries.




But reality, as he soon found, was far from the idealistic visions he had conjured. The underground movement was not the tightly-knit force he had imagined. He should have asked SWALIMO spokesperson Thantaza Silolo why he was so frustrated he felt surrendering himslef to the state and facing jail was better than living with your own comrades who despise, ill treat and abuse you.

He learned that the movement he sought to support was fragmented, plagued by internal squabbles, mistrust, and, worse, a thirst for vengeance rather than justice. The men he had revered from afar were now his "military" superiors, but their charisma and talk of liberation masked a much darker truth—a truth only he knew once working with them. For them, he told the world on his Facebook rants, the goal was no longer to free the people but personal aggrandisement and enrichment. 

At first, Bheka tried to fit in. He used his security training to help where he could, believing he was still part of something larger than himself, a fight for a free and democratic Eswatini. But it didn’t take long before the cracks began to show. The leaders were paranoid, accusing anyone who questioned their methods of being government spies. Bheka was no exception.

His reluctance to participate in acts of violence against fellow comrades—something he had sworn never to do again after leaving the Correctional Services—made him suspect in their eyes. It was Bheka, and later one Sifiso Mahlangu (attempted murder suspect) who startled many of us by suggesting they were given orders to kill fellow members of the Mass democratic movement, orders they ignored. In the words of Mahlangu, instead of being 'revolutionaries' they had become bandits and "tinkhabi" engaged in Renamo style assassination of human targets and extortion of fearful businessen. The truth and otherwise of this is only known by him and his not-so-underground group.

As days turned into weeks, the promises of safety, purpose, and camaraderie faded. Hunger gnawed at him constantly, and the weight of exile began to take its toll. He missed his wife, his children, his home. He was supposed to be fighting for a better future for them, but now he couldn’t even be sure he’d live to see them again.