To Bacede, Mthandeni with love

BEING trusted by the electorate in your constituencies in the year 2018 must have been one of the greatest highlights of your relatively young lives. There were other candidates on offer for the electorate, but they chose you. I can only imagine the fusion of excitement and anxiety that overwhelmed you when the results were announced; it was really happening. Your families and friends were happy for you; others were obviously not.

As the days and weeks went by, this appeared real. Events such as your swearing in and first Parliament sitting were confirmation of the new reality of your lives. You were now to be referred to as honourable ones. Your lives, as you knew them, would never be the same. As novice politicians, you took time to learn parliamentary procedure and had to deepen your understanding of this country’s government machinery and unique system of governance.

You did this in order to better position yourselves to better serve the needs of the thousands who had trusted you to change their lives and material conditions. You knew their suffering very well. Travelling in your constituencies, you had seen and experienced the suffering of your fellow constituents. You had seen many young people lying idle and spending their time on the corridors of Asian-run groceries. You had seen them resort to lives of crime due to lack of employment. You had been to funerals of neighbours and relatives who died ahead of their times. Some of their deaths were a result of perfectly curable diseases that were never treated due to the shortcomings of the country’s health system.

Some died of depression and some of diseases that were exacerbated by poor nutrition. Going into Parliament, you had seen marriages and families disintegrating, owing to the social pressures that come with lack. You had seen the hardships of child-headed families and witnessed the hopes and dreams of countless emaSwati children vanish after they had dropped out of school.

With your own eyes you saw how education lost value. Not many of the young people in your constituencies saw the value of education anymore. Not many of their colleagues made it to university. Very few of those who did, were employed and those who were lucky to be, could barely demonstrate that it was really worth it. They are neck-deep into debt and most of their income must assist their struggling extended families back home.

Pupils

The least said of the road infrastructure in your constituencies, the better. Scores of lucky pupils still have to walk long distances to schools and health care facilities. You saw all this. You are, after all, products of these constituencies. With farm inputs getting ever expensive, you saw, year after year, more and more fields that used to be ploughed lying idle. For many families this was no longer a worthwhile cause.

Driven by all this, you saw Parliament as a very key site of struggle. Having understood how the

tinkhundla system of government operated, you realised that the Executive was at the centre of service delivery and only it could ensure that the lives of the people changed. You realised, most notably, that there were institutional and systemic fault lines in the architecture of the government system that were hugely responsible for the continued suffering of the people in a country perfectly capable of taking care of itself and the one million odd people within its borders. The biggest problem, you realised, was the absence of total accountability and transparency of the Executive to the people, which is due to the lack of the agency.

Accountable

The head of the Executive, you realised and your constituencies agreed with you, was not accountable to the people, because he is not elected by them. It was, and still is your view, that this causes as a sense of impunity and lack of accountability, the result of which then becomes multiple centres of power that are not directly answerable to the people the government for which is purports to serve.

That manifested and still does, in many ways, particularly on the service delivery score. The panacea, you posited, was for the amendment of the Constitution, so that the people would be able to elect their own prime minister. That was the beginning of your suffering.

You have experienced the entire justice system being weaponised against you. The untold suffering you have been subjected to is unimaginable. Take heart, gentlemen; God is watching and true justice will be served. The people of Hosea and Ngwempisi, thousands of emaSwati and indeed, the international community, know very well that you are prisoners of conscience. The number of people who come to your court appearance are not at all reflective of the thousands of sympathisers who, but due to fear and other reasons, cannot make it there. Be fearless and courageous until the end; your sacrifices will not be in vain.