Africa, Combating Desertification and Drought, Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Environment, Food and Agriculture, Headlines, Human Rights

SWAZILAND: Income Rating Hobbles Aid Effort

James Hall

MBABANE, Jan 17 2008 (IPS) - Amanda Dube is literally ‘dirt poor’. Fierce bush fires ravaged Swaziland for months in 2007, and repeatedly swept over the hilly area of Mliba where she lives. Fires burned the trees and vegetation on the small sloping plot where the widowed mother of three attempts to scratch out a maize crop.

Dube was unable to produce any food last year because of drought. The drought wiped out 80 percent of the country’s maize production, and this week even before new trees and maize plants could take root, powerful rainstorms sent torrents of water down the hill and past her stick and thatch hut, carrying away top soil.

“The soil was very poor before. This is a very rocky area and not really good for growing food. But now there is hardly any dirt at all,” the 37-year-old Dube told IPS.

Dube says that she and other Swazis like her are not likely to see the national economy fundamentally strengthened through developmental assistance because in the eyes of the international agencies that decide such things, her country is too affluent.

Two-thirds of the population of Swaziland – less than one million people – live on less than one dollar a day. The unemployment rate is 40 percent, and more than four out of ten Swazis depend on some form of food assistance to stay alive.

Dube’s husband died after “growing very thin” three years ago. Like most Swazis, she will not say he succumbed to an AIDS-related illness because of the stigma attached to AIDS.

Dube is entitled to food aid. She can collect a meagre ration of maize, beans, and cooking oil imported by the World Food Programme (WFP) and distributed by the international relief organisation World Vision.

“The economy is performing poorly, especially in comparison with the other nations of the region,” said Richard Ndwandwe, an investment advisor with an Mbabane bank, told IPS. “We have not achieved 3.0 percent economic growth in a decade, and the central bank says an annual growth rate of 3.6 percent is required just to keep up with population growth,” Ndwandwe said, stressing that the, “net result has been a deterioration in the standard of living for almost all Swazis.”

“It is the rich minority that is skewing the statistical picture, and making the country appear better off than it is for most people,” explained Ndwandwe.

“Social inequalities are increasingly leaving Swaziland with one of the world’s most-skewered income distributions,” noted Peter Beck Christiansen, the European Union’s (EU) ambassador to Swaziland.

Colonial-era landholders and business people who did not have their properties compromised when Swaziland gained its independence 40 years ago, government leaders, and a small – but well-off – clique of Swazi entrepreneurs have amassed wealth that has raised the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Less than twenty percent of the population controls eighty percent of the nation’s wealth, according to the World Bank. But, the World Bank – using GDP to classify the country’s state of economic development – has placed Swaziland in the “low-middle income” category of nations.

“We are far from being a middle income country, but we are not considered a low income country, and this makes a world of difference when it comes to accessing development funding,” said Ndwandwe.

“It is not a fair rating,” Abdoulaye Balde, the country director for the WFP, told IPS from his Mbabane office that coordinates the world’s response to Swaziland’s food shortage crisis. “It does not take into consideration that way most people are living. We are always telling this to our donors,” he stressed.

The director of another humanitarian relief NGO – which receives World Bank logistical assistance – said, “There is so much need in the world and so many peoples competing for limited resources that it is easy for an NGO to go by World Bank guidelines to decline assistance to a country like Swaziland. It’s not necessarily fair.”

Several times this past year, Prime Minister Themba Dlamini and Majozi Sithole, his finance minister, reminded the country that Swaziland does not qualify for low-interest loans or interest-free grants awarded to countries classified as “low income” although a large majority of Swazis – like Dube – live in absolute poverty.

Denied developmental funds, the government’s response has been to encourage economic growth by boosting the private sector, with the hope of increased tax revenue from businesses.

While foreign direct investment (FDI) is sought by globetrotting teams of government officials, ordinary Swazis are encouraged to become “small entrepreneurs.”

Christiansen signed a treaty with Swazi leadership for a 100 million dollar aid package, Wednesday.

“I think that it is a particular responsibility of the country to ensure that ever citizen received a fair share of the national wealth,” Christiansen said.

However, not even the country’s small – and by law nonexistent – opposition groups who speak about countering the ruling monarchy’s grip on governance, have called for wealth redistribution.

“The rich are not going away, and that’s the only way to make Swaziland statistically a low income country,” Anthony Simelane, an attorney based in the central commercial hub Manzini, told IPS. “There is not going to be wealth redistribution that would benefit the poor. The country is denied development funds to help the poor, so all government can hope to do is boost the economy and reap taxes,” Simelane said.

The impediment to this plan is government corruption. Sithole has estimated that the amount of government money lost to various forms of corruption annually equals the country’s national debt.

Christiansen touched on corruption when he signed the EU’s developmental agreement. “I have learned in my three years in Swaziland that no amount of funding or donor assistance can lead to development if the right conditions are not in place. Deficiencies in the areas of governance have and will continue to seriously limit your development progress, with or without the HIV/AIDS threat, ” he told his Swazi hosts.

The EU’s aid package is contingent upon the implementation of what Christensen called “an ambitious governance reform programme to enable Swaziland to reach at least the level of other Southern African countries.”