Twice
the youth of koNtshingila have marched in protest against an injustice to be
denied the right to be ruled by their own chief. They even had to climb a
mountain to reach Hlatikhulu town where some of theirs had been incarcerated by
the police for the protest. Apparently the youth were made aware that police
were blocking the entrance routes to Hlatikhulu, hence the choice of using the
less travelled paths.
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| A protest in London against Human Rights abuses in Swaziland |
Now that
a few of the dissenters have been charged with Sedition, it is unclear who the
ringleaders are. Knowing the judicial system of Swaziland it is doubtful if
this case’s conclusion would have fingered the real “perpetrators”.
It has
almost become common practice that police investigators must use torture as a
means of probing a case, especially cases of the sedition that have
become a default charge for whoever disapproves or complains about the
authorities. It is doubtful if motive will form part of the argument for Tinkhundla regime, because “confession statements” have become the gold standard within the
Swazi Judicial system.
This
case is likely to drag for a few more months, and there is a high possibility
that the evidence brought in court will be so flimsy that it will boil down to
the magistrate giving the alleged seditionists a sentence for arson and the censored
publications selling the final story as nothing but a bunch of disgruntled
youth who set the grass on fire.
THE
MOTIVE
The first
appropriate question would pertain to ascertaining what the youth of
koNtshingila stand to gain from the protest. Judging from their number one
demand of wanting the enthronement of their own chief, it becomes clear that
they would not be the prime benefactors of the spoils of the protest. They
might find favour with the newly enthroned chief, but their benefits would more
or less be restricted to being borrowed more pieces of land and being the
starring-extras in a feast prepared by the chief in honour of the “protest
heroes”. The rest of the bounty would be enjoyed by the chief with family and
friends.
Normally
spoils of chiefdom are a stretch of land that the chief can borrow to whoever
they find worthy to be a resident of the chiefdom. Together with the right of
apportioning the land, the chief also earns the right to extract tribute from
the subjects, and crimes that fall under local jurisdiction also come with
fines in the form of cows, goats and cash, which also form part of the Chief’s
accumulation structure, which is outside of the special tribute extracted
strictly to be surrendered to the king.
It is
doubtful that the youth of koNtshingila could be the chief architects of the
protest in the light that they stand to gain so little from a favourable
aftermath. But their bravery and resilience is proof enough that the
ringleaders correctly identified a youth in need of an answer. Arming the youth
with the wrong question, the ring leaders must have watched in amusement as the
youth eagerly earned themselves prison time while they (ringleaders) earned
themselves the audience of the royal family to again raise a discussion that
seemed to have been dying a permanent death through neglect.
NEW WINE
AND OLD WINESKINS
The second
appropriate question would pertain to ascertaining if the youth will receive a
fair trial, or maybe that the whole affair will be dismissed with a superficial
explanation that, a traditionally oriented group of young people who defied the
norm of questioning their elders and by default committed a taboo of
infuriating the “ancestors”, will be found guilty for a simplistic offence as
calling for an allegedly overdue enthronement of a chief.
As
things stand, a traditional matter is being tried through modern courts, while
at the same time being mediated at a traditional level. Once again progress
will be stalled as two governing systems compete for authority. It is almost a
given that this will also end up twenty one shades of indecision as modern law
tries to accommodate traditional norms that are stubborn to conform to the norm
of human rights and a modern law that has now and again not been adhered to by
traditional authorities because Swazi customary law still holds sway over an
authority at pains to justify and maintain a system that has served as a
perfect camouflage for illegal accumulation.
With little
chance of forcing surrogacy of the youth’s “delinquency” onto the pro-democracy
camp by the Tinkhundla regime, as has always has been the practice, it then
opens up an opportunity for it (the Tinkhundla regime) to finally concede that
what has been asserted by pro-democratic organisations for all these years is
in effect true; that there is a an overwhelming element of counter
productiveness with these contradicting governing systems, and that maybe to
look for an alternative coherent system would be the best solution.
A case
of striking teachers where the king intervened without consulting with the
executive and the judicial arms of the government remains to this day unresolved
and is an enduring ticking time bomb because of the disjointedness of these two
systems.
In a
2013 discussion paper on
Justice Sector and the Rule of Law, Maxine
Langwenya observes
that, “Inconsistencies between Swazi law and international human rights
standards also exist with regard to the right to a fair trial. There are many
other statutory and customary laws which are currently in force in Swaziland,
despite being inconsistent with international norms on human rights, the rule
of law and the delivery of justice.”
Almost
ten years earlier when the IBA (International Bar Association) sent a mission
to Swaziland in January 2003, led by Dr Phillip Tahmindjis, IBA Programme
Lawyer, one of their recommendations was that, “There should be a clear
constitutional or statutory provision acknowledging and clarifying the
relationship between, and the status of, Roman-Dutch common law and customary
law in Swaziland.”
It seems
like once again the two judicial authorities are heading for another convenient
clash where the collateral will be the youth or the "citizens" of koNtshingila. It is doubtful if
the youth will even taste the scraps of victory considering that the no-nonsense
Gelani accused of being an acting chief for more than two decades enjoys
connections in the highest of places.
It is
not obvious if the Tinkhundla judicial system will use the youth of
koNtshingila as an example to aspiring “revolutionaries” who want to stage
uprisings within the feudal system, that such will be met with stiff sentences
equal to those of the “terrorists” that are presently languishing in jail
without being given decent trials, or maybe that it might sell it as a case of
a bunch of delinquent youth who smoked one too many joints of the home-grown,
and dismiss the youth’s uprising as, Buntfwana (Childishness).
WINDS OF
CHANGE
The
regime can also choose to be forward thinking and use this case as a landmark case
to stop and think of the orientation of the population’s support; to really
ascertain if the winds of change are not nippy enough to initiate meaningful
change other than a constitution authored in the royal court.
Cases
like these cannot be sold as “unSwazi” influence of the pro-democratic
movement. These youth have shown that there is discontent as strong as a raging
grass fire within the population. The
statistics are that, around 80% of the eligible voters - according to
government figures and estimations of pro-democracy observer missions - either
boycotted the election or were uninterested. Those that voted inexplicably
signified the need for change as they voted for an almost entirely new House of
Assembly, while giving an effective vote of no confidence to some of the individuals
that were evidently favoured by the system during their time in office.
But again with the system having acquired the
bad habit of laughing in the face of inevitable change, the king confidently
decided he was not going to complement even the overwhelming vote of the minority,
but by sticking to mostly family members when appointing the rest of the
unelected legislators. In his way he again braved nature and its inevitable
change, and once more he has had another laugh at the expense of the inevitable in continuation with the perpetration of nepotism.
