Suchergebnisse

Swaziland is facing a serious fiscal crisis that is threatening to reduce the country into a failed state. The country has a huge budget deficit that has left government operations paralyzed and the threat of government failure to pay monthly salaries for civil servants is ever looming larger. In an attempt to address the situation, the Swaziland government partnered with the IMF to produce fiscal adjustment strategies to stabilize the country's economy through short-term policies. The partnership is crucial to enable the country to get a letter of comfort that would make it possible to receive loans from international financial institutions. The article focuses on an analysis of the explanations for the origins of the crisis. It acknowledges the factual aspects of dominant explanations, but argues that these explanations fail to provide a comprehensive explanation for proper planning of future development of the Swazi economy. The article argues that a more meaningful and long-term effective explanation of the crisis should interrogate the country's governance structure, especially the extent to which it has contributed to the poor performance of the country's economy, how it has contributed to fiscal indiscipline, and how it has nurtured wasteful spending and contributed to increasing levels of corruption.

One of the major problems that has faced African countries since political independence has been continued poverty that has affected the lives of the populations of the countries. While there are numerous issues behind African poverty, corruption has emerged as one of the critical drivers. To address the problem of corruption African governments have been forced to experiment with different strategies, one of which has been the establishment of anti-corruption agencies. Swaziland is one of the African countries that has a huge problem of corruption, and has responded with the formation of an anti-corruption agency. However, since its inception, the agency has failed to operate effectively and corruption has continued to rise. This paper highlights the problem of corruption in Swaziland and the steps taken to curb it. The paper shows that the legal framework and the agency created to combat corruption have failed to yield the desired results, and continues to provide a critical analysis of such failure. It argues that the main issue behind the failure of the agency is royal absolutism wherein the Swazi monarchy has not only become a location of corruption but also perpetuates the scourge through protecting some influential people engaged in corrupt activities.

Like many other African countries, Swaziland has in recent years experienced a rapid growth of various private security initiatives. In urban areas, security privatisation manifests itself in the form of a mushrooming of formal private security companies, while in rural areas, where the majority of people live, informal Community Police groups operating outside the control and recognition of the public police provide protection against crime. This article argues that the growth of private security initiatives in Swaziland cannot be understood only with reference to the 'weak' African state, but must also be analysed in the context of the country's unequal political economy and the utilisation of public security forces for regime security.

The contribution of women in the construction and reconstruction of Swazi historical events has received very little academic attention. Historians of Swazi history have been reluctant to research on the manner in which women in different historical periods have contributed to shaping the events of those periods. Much as there are difficulties in researching this subject, evidence suggests that Swazi women, especially those from the royal family, made substantial contributions to shape historical events and even political destiny of the country. This paper addresses this limitation in Swazi historiography and aims at showing that female agency in Swazi historical events are reality that can be integrated into academic discourse. It uses the contribution of Labotsibeni Mdluli to show how some women struggled to maintain the independence of the country. Her contribution to the struggle for Swazi independence in the nineteenth century serves as a microcosm of how women fought patriarchal attitudes, and imperialist impositions to shape the country's historical events.