I live under Africa’s last absolute monarchy. Here’s what 40 years of total power looks like

Illustration description: An elevated royal throne stands alone at the center of a large circular platform above a map-like landscape. Small roads and buildings spread across the land below, making the throne appear dominant over the country beneath it.

From Friday, 24 to 26 April 2026, the last absolute monarch in sub-Saharan Africa, King Mswati III of Eswatini, celebrated 40 years on the throne. Millions of Emalangeni (the Swazi Lilangeni, SZL, pegged 1:1 to the South African rand, ZAR) were spent on the lavish party at the newly opened Ezulwini Palazzo Hotel (worth over 8 billion Rands) that hosted singer Davido, with gifts worth millions presented to the monarch at Lozitha Palace by private companies, including state-owned enterprises. Presidents of South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia joined the celebrations with other dignitaries, including the former presidents of South Africa, Jacob Zuma; Botswana, Ian Khama; and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kabila. The Taiwanese president, William Lai, who initially could not attend due to pressure from China, had to be flown in secretly on the monarch’s private jet at taxpayer expense. The state machinery has been working overtime to convince the nation, and the watching world, that there is something worth celebrating. 

There have been genuine achievements over these four decades: modest infrastructure has expanded, bilateral relations with Taiwan have benefited from increased agricultural expertise, and pockets of the economy have grown. These are real achievements that shouldn’t be overlooked. However, an honest accounting of the forty-year reign ought to look beyond the ceremonial and ask serious questions about governance, including whether ordinary citizens are better off, freer, healthier, more educated, or more secure than they were in 1986, when the monarch took office at 18. If, on almost every meaningful measure, the answer is troubling, then what follows should not be seen as an attack on the monarch but rather as an indictment of a system of governance that has consistently chosen power over people. 

An economy that works for the few

Eswatini’s economy tells a tale of two worlds, depending on who narrates it. At the very top, a narrow elite of businesspeople and politicians within the monarch’s inner circle controls most of the country’s wealth, while at the bottom, over 60% of the population lives below the poverty line. These are not the natural outcomes of a small, landlocked country with limited resources; they are the predictable results of a deliberate policy environment that has persisted for the past four decades. 

Chief among these policy decisions is the treatment of Tibiyo Taka Ngwane, a sovereign wealth fund established in 1968 by the former monarch, King Sobhuza II. In its founding vision, the fund was intended to hold shares in the country’s major industries in trust for the Swazi nation, forming a genuine social security architecture built on the country’s productive assets. Four decades later, that vision has been quietly hollowed out. The fund operates without parliamentary scrutiny, pays no tax, and its benefits accrue not to the broad citizenry but to those at the very top of the political hierarchy. The late Mario Masuku, one of the country’s most enduring advocates for democracy, once described it as a “feedlot for the king and his inner circle.” What could have been the foundation of a genuine social safety net, shielding ordinary Swazis from poverty and unemployment, instead became a vehicle for elite accumulation.

This pattern of monopolisation extends across the economy, with major industries such as sugarcane farming, construction, media, and telecommunications dominated by entities closely tied to the ruling elite and their cronies. In the Lubombo region – the heart of Eswatini’s sugar belt and one of the country’s most significant sources of export revenue – this dynamic is most stark. Sugarcane has long been described as ‘Swazi gold’, yet the benefits of this gold elude the small-scale farmers who live and work the land surrounding the big corporations in the region. 

The dual land tenure system, inherited from colonialism and never meaningfully reformed, divides the country between commercially productive Title Deed Land (TDL), where large-scale sugarcane, citrus and timber operations flourish, and the Swazi Nation Land (SNL), where the majority of the population attempts subsistence farming on plots allocated by chiefs, with no title, no security and often no realistic path to commercial agriculture. One farmer in Lubombo told international researchers that she could not even afford a tractor, let alone the joining fees and documentation required to join a sugar cooperative.

This is not an accident. The IMF has repeatedly recommended land tenure reform as a structural solution to Eswatini’s deepening economic inequality. The government has consistently declined to act because a system in which all SNL is held in trust by the monarch and allocated through chiefs who are instruments of royal authority is also a system of political control. In Eswatini, land is not merely an economic resource; it is a political tool of governance and power. Reforming tenure would redistribute power. 

Equally, trade unions, which should provide workers with the only meaningful counterweight to this concentration of economic power, have been treated with consistent hostility. While unions are formally permitted, obtaining and retaining legal status is deliberately onerous, and union leaders have repeatedly been targeted under the country’s broad sedition and terrorism laws. The environment for workers’ rights has never been allowed to develop into a genuine check on employers or the state.

An education system left to wither

No institution has suffered more from deliberate underfunding than the University of Eswatini, once the country’s flagship institution of higher learning and a producer of some of southern Africa’s most distinguished public figures, including South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe and former prime minister of Lesotho, Pakalitha Mosisili, among many others. Industry experts who have assessed the institution in recent years have described it in bleak terms, and it now receives about a third of its requested budget from the government to run its operations for a student body of about 7,000. Government scholarship coverage, once universal for qualifying students, has been systematically reduced since the 2008 global financial crisis, and the decline has been steep, leaving thousands of young Swazis unable to afford tertiary education. The consequences have been predictable and devastating, with many linking the education crisis to a lack of scholarships.

When the government fails to pay stipends to sponsored students, as it repeatedly has, students with no other means of support are left without food and other basic necessities. When student representative bodies negotiate, and those negotiations fail, protest follows. And when protest follows, the state’s response has never been to address the underlying failure but to criminalise the students. Presidents of the Swaziland National Union of Students have been arrested under terrorism and sedition laws, assaulted by police, expelled from universities, denied the right to leave the country, and had their scholarships withdrawn. One former student leader described, with devastating clarity, being unable to study, unable to work, unable to travel, and facing twenty-five years in prison not for any act of violence but for leading a student movement. As recently as 2024, a twenty-six-year-old student activist, Menzi Bongeka Bhembe, was charged under the Suppression of Terrorism Act and held in arbitrary detention for over two years without a fair trial. The criminalisation of student activism has produced exactly what any reasonable observer would predict: it has painted the student body as radical and dangerous, when the radicalism, if the term must be used, begins with a government that withholds the basic necessities from its own students and then deploys armed police when they object. 

There is a particularly troubling dimension to the question of the curriculum in this context. The recent halt to funding for humanities studies is not a bureaucratic technicality; it is, whether intentional or not, an attack on the foundations of critical thinking. The Bachelor of Arts in humanities includes courses such as English, geography, history, religious studies, and African languages, disciplines that teach students to inhabit perspectives other than their own, to question received wisdom, and to recognise the difference between the stories they are told and the realities they live. A government that criminalises political dissent has an obvious interest in ensuring that young people do not study courses that advance critical thinking. It is also worth noting that the constitutional promise of free primary education, a written commitment, was realised only after civil society groups and lawyers took the state to court and won. Political will to educate the nation’s children, it turns out, required a court order.

Healthcare: a system corroded from within

The public healthcare system is another story of chronic underfunding compounded by acute mismanagement, resulting in shortages or stockouts of life-saving drugs. However, the 2024 scandal illustrated the system’s fragility with unusual clarity. Following the suspension of a senior official at Swazi Pharm, the government’s primary pharmaceutical supplier, it emerged that she had been the sole authorised signatory for import permits for controlled medicines. When she was removed, no one was appointed to replace her. For ten months, from February to November 2024, the country had no government official authorised to sign import permits for critical medicines, including morphine, fentanyl, phenobarbital, and haloperidol. Patients requiring pain management and psychiatric care went without treatment, not because the medicines did not exist, but because of administrative paralysis born of institutional neglect.

Meanwhile, Swazi Med, Eswatini’s largest medical aid scheme and a lifeline for middle-class families, has been mired in a governance crisis, with reserves collapsing and South African medical facilities reportedly turning away its members. Private healthcare has expanded to fill gaps that public healthcare cannot, but it is accessible only to those with steady incomes and medical aid cover. For the majority of Swazis who have neither, the erosion of public healthcare is not a policy inconvenience; it is a death sentence deferred.

Democracy deferred: a fifty-year wait 

The formal suppression of political pluralism in Eswatini predates the current reign. In April 1973, King Sobhuza II suspended the independence constitution and banned all political parties. That decree has never been repealed. The 2005 constitution guarantees freedom of association, yet political parties remain excluded from electoral participation. The Tinkhundla system, which requires all parliamentary candidates to stand as independents and gives the monarch absolute authority to appoint the prime minister, the cabinet, and significant portions of both houses of parliament, is far from democratic. It is an administrative architecture of absolute power, dressed in the language of participatory governance.

The cost of challenging this system has been paid in years of imprisonment, exile, and bloodshed. Mario Masuku, who led the banned People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO) for decades, was repeatedly arrested and detained on sedition and terrorism charges for political advocacy. Jan Sithole, a former trade unionist and democracy advocate, spent years fighting within and outside the system for basic political rights. Thulani Maseko, a brilliant and courageous human rights lawyer who had already served more than a year in prison for writing critically about the judiciary, was shot dead in his home in front of his family in January 2023. His killers have not been brought to justice. No credible investigation has ever been conducted. This is not a country where political change is merely difficult; it is a country where advocating for change can cost you your life.

The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision to uphold the Sedition and Subversive Activities Act, a colonial-era law that criminalises speech deemed to incite “disaffection” against the monarchy, is a case study in how archaic legislation is weaponised to silence dissent. Sedition laws of this kind, which do not require proof of actual harm or incitement to violence, are fundamentally incompatible with the democratic principles enshrined in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, to which Eswatini is a signatory, and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A law that makes it a criminal offence to express dissatisfaction with one’s government does not protect public order; it protects power. The convictions of pro-democracy members of parliament, who were sentenced to 85 and 58 years respectively under the same terrorism framework, confirm that the justice system has become a tool of governance rather than a safeguard against abuse.

Human rights: the full toll 

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Forty years of concentrated, unaccountable power have produced predictable results across every domain of human rights. The country’s prisons are under-resourced, overcrowded, and documented sites of ill-treatment. Press freedom is effectively non-existent: the state controls all broadcast media, and independent journalists operate under constant legal threat. The constitutional requirement that women constitute at least 30% of parliamentary representation has produced token numbers without substantive representation, and customary law continues to constrain women’s property and land rights, compounding their economic vulnerability.

Organisations that seek to hold the state accountable, whether on democracy, labour rights, or minority rights, face registration denials, surveillance, and harassment. The government’s refusal to register Eswatini Sexual and Gender Minorities (ESGM), the organisation I founded, is emblematic of a broader strategy: deny civil society legal recognition, and you deny it the tools to operate lawfully, raise funds, and engage formally with institutions. This is not incidental bureaucracy; it is deliberate exclusion. The recent attack on LGBTIQ+ people in Eswatini, marked by the King’s public characterisation of queer people as “ungodly” and effectively unwelcome, follows a recognisable pattern. 

What is there to celebrate?

Eswatini is a small, resilient, and culturally rich nation. Its people have endured, created, and built community under extraordinary pressure. The question asked during the festivities – whether there is anything worth celebrating in forty years of this reign – is not about the Swazi people. It is about governance.

And on governance, the record is one of failure: a wealth fund captured by the few; a university starved of funding while its students are criminalised; a health system so poorly managed that patients died for want of a signature; a democracy denied for more than fifty years; human rights defenders assassinated while their killers remain protected by impunity; and a civil society under constant siege.

The millions that were spent on celebrating could have funded the scholarships that were cut, the medicines that were unavailable,  and the legal aid that was withheld. Every lilangeni spent on a gift at Lozitha Palace is a lilangeni not spent on the citizen at the Lubombo clinic who could not get phenobarbital, or on the student who left university because the government stopped paying their allowance.

There is always something to celebrate in survival. But the celebration of a governance record like this one, with its pomp, invited presidents, and state-media hagiography, is not a celebration of the Swazi people. It is a demand that they applaud the conditions of their own subjugation. That is not a demand they should be expected to meet.

* Melusi Simelane is an Editorial Board Member at Minority Africa.

Edited/Reviewed by: Caleb Okereke, PK Cross, and Uzoma Ihejirika.