WHEN WILL SWAZIS SAY ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
At what point does a nation decide that enough is enough?
In Eswatini, the fight for essential drugs and medical supplies in public hospitals has been shamefully reduced to a matter for nurses and their associations. The rest of society watches from a distance—as if the health of the nation’s most vulnerable is not their fight too. Why is the absence of medication not a national crisis?
Why aren’t we filling the streets like the Kenyans did when their government tried to force austerity down their throats? What will it take to make Swazis angry? Have we been euthanised into our suffering, slowly numbed by years of indignity? Or is this now a full-blown case of Stockholm syndrome, where we empathise with our abuser because we’ve forgotten what freedom, justice, and accountability feel like?
How do you scroll past royal children flaunting designer bags, Swiss watches, and Parisian wardrobes on Instagram, while your children sit jobless, your hospitals go without antibiotics, and potholes crater the roads that were never properly built in the first place? How does a Minister of Finance justify gifting over a billion Emalangeni from public coffers to the king—every single year—while thousands of orphaned and vulnerable children go to bed hungry? Where is your empathy?
A Birthday of Gluttony Amidst Hunger The king’s birthday this year was not just a celebration—it was a display of obscene wealth and shameless gluttony. Behind closed doors, private dinners were hosted, foreign artists were flown in, champagne flowed, and the elite feasted while the rest of the country watched from a distance—hungry, broke, broken. The worst part? Ordinary citizens were expected to "voluntarily" offer tetfulo—gifts to the king—as if he were not already wealthier than the entire country combined.
Civil servants, business owners, schoolchildren, even struggling pensioners dug into their already meagre pockets to offer livestock, cash, and groceries to a monarch who owns fleets of luxury cars, a private jet, and palaces across the country. And the king? He accepted them. Without shame. Without pause. Without reflection on what it means to take from the poor when you already have more than you could ever need. What does it say about us, as a nation, that we allow this?
How have we normalised a system in which one man—born into power—demands peace, yet when the people pleaded for it in 2021, he responded with bullets and bloodshed? He refused accountability even as SADC quietly begged for a political solution. And still, we watch in silence. How has the king convinced you that being Swazi means celebrating culture only in his image—his ceremonies, his regiments, his pomp? While other nations take pride in innovation, technology, education, and progress, we’re reduced to annual pageants of submissiveness.
And where is the middle class? The professionals, the businesspeople, the educated elite? Watching politicians squabble over drug shortages with no intention to end the crisis? Watching as Eswatini is carved up by a few oligarchs, chief among them Shakantu, whose companies suffocate fair competition and violate labour rights with impunity? Where is the private sector when real entrepreneurs are silenced, when local industries are starved while one family and their cronies feast?
There is no democracy, no dignity, no development under a system that devours its own people while parading wealth as virtue. The king does not build this country. He drains it. He is not the solution. He is the problem. This is not just about monarchy. It’s about the complicity of a people who refuse to confront injustice. It’s about a society so traumatised that it has forgotten what outrage feels like. It’s about a nation that has allowed itself to believe that suffering is normal and change is impossible. But change is possible. It starts the day we stop pretending that this is okay.
Swazis, when will you say enough?
PS: pictures sourced from Swazi Royal Leeches Lifestyle, a page dedicated to exposing the expensive taste of the royal family.