Swaziland: Contemporary Social and Economic Issues

Peter G. Forster, Bongani J. Nsibande

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138727588
• eBook ISBN: 9781351750257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This title was first published in 2000: Up-to-date information on socio-economic issues in contemporary Swaziland is not always readily accessible. This work fills that gap, by including contributions by Swazi scholars, based on recent research. Swaziland is of particular interest because of its culture and development, the special characteristics of small states and regional development in Southern Africa. Swaziland faces some problems found generally in developing areas but others are distinctive. The cultural dimension to development is paid close attention throughout.

PART I
NATIONAL SECURITY AND STABILITY

1 Swaziland’s Security Concerns in a Changed South Africa

BONGANI J. NSIBANDE

Introduction

The overthrow of the P.W. Botha ministry in a palace coup in 1989 was significant less for Botha as an individual than for what his ministry represented.

From its onset around the turn of the century, the process of capitalist industrialization in South Africa under British rule had one enduring feature, although it manifested itself in various state forms. This feature was that it ‘had little to do with granting Africans political rights, or with “freedom and justice” … in the case of Southern Africa, there was no intention to change the property relations already existing in the region’ (Marks and Trapido, 1979, p.52)

By the time the P.W. Botha fraction of South Africa’s ruling classes asserted itself at the hegemonic centre, pre-existing measures for securing the process of accumulation had begun to show themselves no longer equal to the task in hand. An extended period of arrogant repression under two previous administrations was complemented by half-hearted measures to initiate ‘dialogue’ and ‘détente’ with respect to apartheid, but at the same time excluded apartheid’s victims (Johnson and Martin, 1986). This policy was soon brought to a crisis by the deepening challenge of liberation forces in the region, in both the diplomatic and the military spheres.

An understanding of the dialogue/détente era in pre-Botha South Africa is important in order to understand subsequent developments. In a real sense, the search for a form of state suited to securing the conditions of accumulation in changed and changing circumstances was not only the concern of earlier attempts at dialogue/détente. It was also what de Klerk subsequently set out to achieve¹. The South African ruling classes have typically attempted to preserve their position of power by striking coalitions with opportunistic elements of the oppressed and marginalizing and repressing most of the rest of the population². This has continued by the isolation of collaborative elements while pressing ahead with establishing popular structures and other formations as a counterweight to securing capitalist domination.

The coexistence of these two historical processes has been a testimony to the continued struggle between capital and oppressed forces: the first aiming at preservation of the established system of production, and the second fighting for the establishment of a new society. The conflict has been between an old society and one struggling to be born.

Capital has reorganized production relations in the course of the social transformation of the region on the basis of a division of labour which accorded with the requirements of the emergent property relations, while being in tune with the strategy of coalition formation with dominant elements among the oppressed³. There was not always unanimity with regard to the best method of effecting the division of labour, even though the ultimate aim of all sectors of capital was not in dispute. The characterization of the nineteenth-century Afrikaner state as ‘a medieval race oligarchy’ unequal to the task of ‘rationally’ deploying labour for the industrialization project was an indication of the divergent perspectives of the South African dominant classes. So also were the sustained efforts aimed at the ethnic break-up of the African population into labour reserves for industry.

Some of these labour reserves (including not only Bantustans, but also Swaziland and some others upon which internationally recognized national status was conferred) congealed into societies characterized by intensifying internal social differentiation, inseparably intertwined with the process of accumulation in the rest of South Africa.

The crisis of capital accumulation in South Africa eventually deepened, not least because of the intensification of armed and other forms of resistance both internally and abroad. The South African state responded by experimenting once more with various methods of defending its ruling classes and preserving the established relations of production. However, changes were taking place in the Southern African region, which appeared to be geared to move in a direction materially and socially divergent from the status quo in South Africa (Johnson and Martin, 1986; Hanlon, 1986). In turn South Africa’s internal and regional mechanisms for preserving the domination of capital were also being affected and had to be retooled.

South Africa under the Botha regime initially felt secure with a policy of forcefully and triumphantly rolling back the unfolding process of change in the region in favour of the status quo dominated by itself. However, this strategy suffered a severe setback in 1987–8, when South Africa and Unita forces failed to secure victory during decisive confrontations in Cuito Cunanavale (Angola). The military setback, together with intensified internal and external pressures on the South African state, culminated in the jettisoning of the Botha regime. Such a development formed part of the recasting of South Africa’s internal, regional and international strategy for defending the interests of capital. It had become clear that what was needed was a historic bloc capable of more than just violent repression internally and aggression against recalcitrant neighbours. An ideological and economic infrastructure was to be set up, which would be capable of absorbing popular energies in a social partnership, which would not be too threatening to the existing power structure. It is in this context that the security concerns of Swaziland have to be placed.

There is general consensus on the fact of South Africa’s regional, even continental economic hegemony. South Africa produces 80 per cent of the region’s GNP. Also, 77 per cent of the region’s electricity generation and consumption takes place in South Africa. Until recently, South Africa had been producing 77 per cent of the region’s staple food, maize, and 87 per cent of its wheat needs. South Africa also produces 97 per cent of the region’s coal supply, 98 per cent of its iron ore, and 67 per cent of its sugar cane.

In addition, the South African mining industry alone has depended upon its SADCC neighbours for up to 40 per cent of its labour force. South Africa’s neighbours, who subsidize a large percentage of capital accumulation in South Africa through subsistence support of the migrant labour system, are recipients of the residue of the migrants’ rural labour power remitted back to the migrants’ rural families. Officially published figures do not present the whole picture, since they exclude those working illegally under the same exploitative conditions. It is evident that South African capitalist interests need to be assured that there exists a political and economic order in the region and that is not threatening internally to established property relations.

In the recent past some scholars working on the permutations of South African strategy in the region have commented, sometimes rather surprisedly, that Swaziland was spared the wrath of South Africa’s ruling classes in their attempt to stem the liberation process internally and regionally. Some have gone on to assert that the reason is that of all Southern African countries, including Malawi, Swaziland proved to be the most willing to collaborate (cf. Daniel, 1989).

It is undoubtedly the case that ever since the formation of the Swaziland ruling monarchy’s party in 1963 (the Imbokodvo National Movement, INM), there developed a firm pattern of collaboration between the dominant political leadership in Swaziland and in South Africa. These ties, though of much longer duration (cf. Bonner, 1983), are particularly significant for the present discussion with respect to the period of growth of African nationalism in Swaziland in the nineteen-sixties. This occurred mainly under the influence of South African Pan-African organizations, notably the ANC and the PAC. Such developments caused elements of the Swazi monarchy to become increasingly unsettled at the prospect of suffering after independence the fate of chiefly institutions elsewhere in Africa. Too often had the ‘traditional’ institution of chieftainship been done away with in those countries for the Swazi monarchy to remain indifferent.

This practice of getting rid of recalcitrant chiefly institutions has historically been one of the preferred weapons used by an ascendant petty bourgeois group. This includes the Nationalist Party version in South Africa, when faced with those chiefs who were unwilling to accept apartheid measures. However, this did not prevent the Swazi ‘traditional’ leadership from striking alliances with the Nationalist Party. The preoccupation of the former was to forestall a possible African nationalist takeover of the government when, as it became increasingly clear it would, Swaziland became independent. A shared interest made the alliance not only possible but also desirable. Swaziland’s King Sobhuza II could not be accused of having been a conscious champion of apartheid; but in the sometimes very deadly game of politics, he certainly seems to have known when to ‘hold, play or run’ in the three-cornered game with Swazi nationalists on the one hand and the South African Nationalist Party politicians on the other. The South Africans, for their part, had an interest in stopping the possible ascendance to power in Swaziland of a Pan-Africanist grouping sympathetic to Black South African nationalists. The project to forestall such a development became even more crucial following the criminalization of African popular movements in South Africa. To the South African state, African nationalism in Swaziland was a virtual surrogate baby of Communism which in Churchillian language deserved simply to be throttled at birth. The basis therefore existed for an alliance between power groups frightened of the prospect of being swept out of their positions of power by forces perceived as upholding a world-view diametrically opposed to their own.

In any case, South African interests in Swaziland dates back to the time in the nineteenth century when the Afrikaner fraction of immigrant settlers laid the basis of their future accumulation by acquiring vast private property in their country through land concessions granted by the Swazi monarchy. The sequel to this has been that since the early 1960s, successive South African governments have offered varied support to the Swazi royalty including the notorious ‘land for booting out the ANC’ deal in the early 1980s. Such measures worked in favour of the South African state and the Swazi state, as has been amply demonstrated especially for the post-colonial period (Davies, O’Meara and Dlamini, 1985).

The Afrikaner settlers came to constitute an influential lobby. At one stage between the Second World War and 1968, they sought legislation to provide for policies governing labour-capital relations that would ensure their own development as a dominant class: this was especially true of the commercial farmer fraction. As African nationalism came increasingly to assert itself in Swaziland, influential sections among the immigrant capitalist farmers appealed to South Africa to take over Swaziland so as, in Cold War parlance, to ‘save it from Communism’. When confronted with British opposition to their aims, they formed a racist, Whites-only political party known as the United Swaziland Association, in order to press its political and economic demands. Like the Nationalist Party in South Africa, this immigrant settler capitalist farmer group in Swaziland raised the spectre of the growth of African nationalism. It sought ways of forestalling the triumph of such nationalism, as a mechanism for defending its own economic and political prominence.

Bonner (1983) has argued persuasively that historically alliances between African rulers and immigrant settlers have not always been based on the military weakness of African rulers alone. He shows that in many cases they arose as a consequence of mutual vulnerability vis-à-vis each other’s enemies. A similar conclusion, with some qualifications, seems to suggest itself at the political level on close inspection of the apparently bizarre alliances between the Swazi leadership and the apartheid state and settler capital. What the settler lacked at the political level, the Swazi monarchy could deliver in a majority rule political system under its own control. This was in exchange for economic support and protection against the feared Pan-Africanists.

It needs also to be put on record that the South African state, in the run-up to political independence, provided the Swazi monarchy with political advice. Van Wyk de Vries, a member of the Broederbond, was called in to help the monarchy to launch its own political party in opposition to the Pan-African nationalists. As the racist United Swaziland Association later threw in its lot with the monarchical forces, the South African state facilitated the cementing of the historic bloc that would serve settler, South African and monarchical interests well in the future. Material help was provided through supplies of electoral wherewithal (such as motor vehicles), and probably also financial support.

It would be an oversimplification to suggest that the Swazi state was prostituting itself to South Africa. What we have here is rather a situation arising out of an extended period of tactical cooperation for mutual material benefit between forces united by a shared world view, except perhaps on the matter of race separation. There seems also to be a lacuna in analyses that, on the one hand, present the Swazi state as somehow an independent entity vis-à-vis South Africa, capable of acting in a different way than it has done (Daniel, 1989); but at the same time purport to show that it is deeply in pawn to South African capital, with a politically dominant monarchy that is a major material beneficiary of existing social relations (Davies, O’Meara and Dlamini, 1985).

More detailed data could be presented to show abundantly clearly that for all intents and purposes, Swaziland is a branch of South Africa in politico-economic terms. It is also evident that by the time INM was an undisputed heir to the post-colonial state in 1968, it had already clearly elaborated an economic philosophy of free-wheeling capitalism⁴, backed with an ideology of rabid anti-Communism and anti-terrorism of the variety usually christened in Washington and serviced from Pretoria⁵.

It has to be recognized that the entrepreneurial activities of the Swazi royalty date much further back than the independence era. They go back to the time in the nineteenth century when an effective landlord-tenant relationship between the Swazi royalty and immigrant settlers in what is now Transvaal was established. Estimates put the annual rental due to the Swazi royalty for stock grazing and prospecting for minerals at approximately £12, 000 ($60,000), a considerable amount at the time.

In the run up to political independence, the monarchical forces were afforded the opportunity to fine tune their already developed entrepreneurial acumen to the opportunities for accumulation which were about to unfold with independence, and thus also to nurture and entrench their class power. The subsequent struggle to secure space in the on-going process of capital accumulation, otherwise dominated by South African and international capital, formed a critical component of the ‘constitutional’ proposals package put forward by INM in negotiations with the British. A key proviso here was the insistence that, regardless of who inherited state power, royalties from the exploitation of mineral wealth were to accrue directly to the Swazi monarch, as opposed to the usual practice whereby the central administration would be the supreme authority over all the nation’s treasury. The British government was informed by the Swazi monarchy that this was not negotiable.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction:
• Part I: National Security and Stability
• Part II: Family, Gender and Household
• Part III: Development: Urban and Rural
• Part IV: Development in Health and Education
• Index of Personal Names
• Index of Place Names
• Subject Index