THIS IS THE SWAZILAND I WANT

graduation ceremony

Just yesterday after concluding my first lecture, there goes my phone “shhhhh” and that’s a message notification. So I did as expected looked at it, it was a comment to my last blog post. So I went through it and suddenly I started smiling as I read through, it felt good seeing someone coming out to the open voicing out the Swaziland she wants. I couldn’t contain myself and felt very compelled to share it with everyone.

Lack of freedom of expression and action in Swaziland has created the scandal fatigue. We are totally afraid of victimization by government. Worse is that at least 70% of Swazi's are civil servants. So how do we revolt against this system, especially if it’s the hand that butters our daily bread? Its truly a difficult situation, particularly because the culture of sacrifice and risk is not in most of us, worse is that most of us come from Christian backgrounds which have been used indirectly by the system to doom us, thus we are passive and accept horrible situations in the name that the next world will be better & earthly things should be left the way they are. Imagine a country where every graduate was guaranteed of a job, all children had access to education, the elderly were taken care of, there was comprehensive health care at an affordable price, freedom of expression without fear of victimization, access to sexual and reproductive welfare, affordable and fair trade terms with a booming private sector and investment, easy access to and exchange of technology, good governance where accountability and performance were key performance indicators to determine the tenure of the government in office. THIS IS THE SWAZILAND I WANT...

A Swaziland where people know that they have an active responsibility to shape their futures and the powers to shape these futures would fully reside with them & not the government or the ruling system in place. People should have influence on at least 90% of what occurs in government particularly if we say Swaziland is democratic country. Radical change is important for the liberation of Swaziland and its people. Bit by Bit has run its course. Now is the time to formulate strategies and try to improve what’s on the ground. We should start now to change the lives of our people and ourselves in the communities we live in. We should start now initiating programs for a sustainable Swaziland. Good Governance should start in our communities, homes, work place, etc. Now is the time to change and shape the culture of doing things.

We young people should join hands and start doing things for ourselves so that the government that we put in place would be a way to elevate us.