Labour Wrap: Swaziland - an elite conundrum?

Cape Town - There is a great deal happening on the labour front this week, says Terry Bell in his latest labour wrap.  The public sector wages dispute continues, as does the toll workers battle and Medupi seems set for more industrial unrest while the Cosatu saga continues to unravel.

He notes that most of these issues have been dealt with on this platform in recent weeks and months and there is little new to add.  The only new aspect of the Cosatu story is the fact that the federation’s dismissed general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, is now travelling about taking his message to workers in defiance of a ruling by the Cosatu executive.

READ: Cosatu warns unions attending Vavi address

Bell adds, however, that what the Cosatu fracas has done, has been to raise clearly the issue of democracy.  Not just within the trade union movement, but in a much wider context.

And this, he says, became highly pertinent over the Easter weekend when there were “the usual platitudes about peace and tranquility”.  Because it was in the run-up to Easter that the International Trade Union Confederation, other union groups and labour supporting members of the European parliament came out in protest against what is happening in Swaziland.

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In that country, says Bell, the despotic King Mswai III, “uses the national treasury as a personal piggy bank”.  But while, internationally, Mswati and his administration are condemned for harassing and detaining trade unionists and democracy campaigners, there is relative silence from South Africa.

Why should this be so? asks Bell. And should it really matter to South Africans?

He points out that what happens in Swaziland should be of deep concern to South Africa;  that instability in such a region would have serious consequences for its neighbours.  And he wonders if the contacts between local elites and the world’s last feudal monarchy are perhaps responsible for dimming the beacon of hope and democracy that South Africa is still claimed to be.

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