We deserve peaceful, safe Eswatini

Sir,

Past national budget allocations have shown that taxpayers have paid more than double towards security forces than to the health sector, yet Eswatini is among the most peaceful countries on the African continent. When comparing the country with other countries of similar population size and trends in the availability of resources, Lesotho and Mauritius, the Eswatini Government has the highest expenditure allocated to the armed forces; this is more than what is allocated to capital projects.

Safer

So, in effect, we should be safer than we are healthier in this country, but no. We seem to be both sick and highly vulnerable to crime. Surely this is not right. Why are we spending more on security only to receive worse crime rates in return? The security forces’ leaders owe this country an explanation, especially now that they are among the highest paid civil servants in the country.

The Malaysian Government was once faced with a similar predicament, so it decided that since the country was not at war, it would use the army and correctional officers in a well coordinated and collaborative way to fight crime.

Cleaning

They started cleaning house in their police service by removing all police officers from behind the desks. All clerical work was given to civil servants who had little or no work to do in the various ministries, especially where the duplication of duties was rampant. Does this sound familiar?

Idle Malaysian civil servants were transferred and given office duties in police stations and this allowed extra police officers to be put on the streets and suddenly there was more visibility. The army also put its idle personnel on joint patrols with the police. The end product was a very high impact in terms of visibility and crime reduction, which contributed to the rapid results desired by the citizens.

Back home, we have often witnessed the collaboration between the three armed forces, but only for certain incidents. Well it is time for a permanent partnership until such time we have a war to attend to.

So the next time we hear of a request to increase budget allocations for the security forces, they need to tell us why they are failing to pool their resources together to reduce the crime rate in this country. We deserve a very peaceful and safe country but what we have is a high cost security, with low impact and very slow execution of reducing the crime rate.

Babe Dlamini