By Velaphi Mamba.
Africa-Press – Eswatini. The country has a King not that the King has a country, this is the cardinal principle that informs the tapestry of the Swazi revolution.
For decades national Sovereignty has been defined within the prism of the royal family. They have placed themselves, through the Tinkhundla system, at the centre of public life. It is as if our very existence depends on them and that without them there can be no state. This is nonsense and it is time for it to be challenged.
The confusion between kingship and ownership lies at the heart of our country’s decade’s long political crisis. The Monarchy has successfully woven itself into our traditional and cultural fabric through a well-organized form of cultural nationalism whose key objective is to anchor and sustain royal hegemony.
But a Monarch does not own the soil, the rivers, the treasury, or the destiny of this country. Sovereignty does not reside in a surname.
It resides in the nation – all that exists in the country belongs to the people.
King Sobhuza recognized this through his timeless declaration: Akusiko kwami, kwebantfu.
That he acted in questionable ways is a discussion for another day. His words remain both constant and relevant today and must be the basis of the philosophical underpinnings of the nation state.
Under the Tinkhundla system, the political narrative has been carefully constructed to elevate the royal household above the people.
The architecture of governance places the King at the apex of executive authority, legislative influence and judicial appointment.
This fusion of powers has produced a political culture in which questioning authority is equated with treason. It has manufactured a political reality where the nation is relegated to second class subjects in their own country.
It is repeated endlessly that the monarchy is the centre of Swazi national identity. The people are silenced through a mix of both soft and coercive tools aimed at retaining royal supremacy. The lines have been deliberately blurred to create the myth that the country cannot exist without royal dominance.
That myth is both false and fallacious. Nations predate rulers and outlive them.
America and Israel just killed the Ayatollah of Iran, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, part of their narrative is that the Iranian people have a right to govern themselves. Whether one agrees with American and Israeli foreign policy or not is beside the point.
The principle they invoke – that the Iranian people have a right to self-determination is a universal and fundamental one. That same principle applies to our country, as it applies to any other nation. If Iranians have the right to determine their political future, so do emaSwati.
Sovereignty cannot be selectively applied. Therefore, no family has exclusive rights over national sovereignty. No lineage, however storied, can claim permanent guardianship over a modern state.
The idea that one household should stand as the ultimate proprietor of public power contradicts the very notion of citizenship.
A citizen is not a subject to be managed and oppressed, a citizen is a co-owner of the nation state. The state and its people are not the private property of any family no matter what historical pedigree they might claim.
I come from the Mamba Royal household under King Bhokweni II. Historically, we have fought for this country to be what it is today. Our DNA as a clan forms part of an indelible history that cannot be erased. The Mamba Royal household co-exists peacefully with the different clans under its leadership, but it cannot claim that it owns them. They own themselves, authority in that context is relational, not possessive.
Leadership exists by recognition, not by confiscation of identity. That distinction is critical.
Even within traditional structures, coexistence does not equate to ownership. Why then should the Dlamini monarchy be treated as an exception to this principle?.
Why must national sovereignty be personalized and confined to a single family? The Swazi question is, in the main, about clarifying power.
It is about disentangling heritage from hegemony and ensuring that the fulcrum of public power rests squarely on the people through democratic institutions.
The people are sovereign and this is the fundamental point. The question of political parties is secondary to the Swazi question. Political parties are instruments of political expression through the freedoms of association – mechanisms through which representation can be organized. They are not the essence of the freedom we are fighting for.
The essence of freedom is the recognition that authority flows upward from the people and not downward from a throne. The King and his family banned political parties because they do not want scrutiny and accountability. They want to preserve a political template where they do as they please without consequence. In a system without organized opposition, power operates in a vacuum. Consequential decisions affecting our country are taken without institutional challenge or robust debate because the monarchy believes, misguidedly, that it must think on our behalf.
Budgets are crafted without parliamentary independence and national resources are allocated without transparent oversight. This blanket concentration of power is what Tinkhundla really is. I call it nonsense.
The claim that multi-party democracy is foreign to Swazi culture is intellectually dishonest and politically impotent. The principle that leaders must answer to those they govern is older than colonial borders. It exists in every community that values dignity. To argue otherwise is to weaponize culture against the people.
The revolution is therefore not merely about introducing parties or contesting elections. It is about redefining sovereignty. It is about affirming that the state does not belong to a dynasty. It belongs to its citizens. It belongs to the people.
We cannot continue to conflate kingship with ownership. To say the King owns no country is a clarion call for constitutional clarity. It is an insistence that public office – even monarchical office – must operate within limits defined by the people.
If we are to retain the Monarchy, it must be subjected to the principles of modern statehood and a constitutional order based on the rule of law where it is not above the people.
The dog must wag the tail; the tail must not wag the dog, the future of our country cannot be built on inherited entitlement and must be built on shared citizenship.
“The people shall govern” is therefore a statement of the affirmation of the dignity and sovereignty of the citizens of our country. This is the moral centre of the Swazi struggle. The country has a King. But the country belongs to its people – alisilo lenu BakaNgwane, lemaSwati! Let this be clear to every LiSwati. It is time.
