March for free primary education!!!

The barefooted girl is a 9-year-old Grade 1 pupil who featured in my PhD research fieldwork. She's the fatherless daughter of a single mother who works as a lowly paid garment factory labourer. Without free free primary education, she has no hope of completing school.

A woman knocked down by a motorist at a zebra crossing holds tight to her baby until she is helped up by members of the public. Police are deployed to monitor jaywalking and enforce crossing at designated points like this one in the byzzy city streets. But motorists don't even respect the zebra crossings. Meanwhile, thugs like the one who shot my brother have a field day in the rural areas of Swaziland.

Wherever you are in Swaziland, in neighbouring South Africa, or in Mozambique, and whatever you initially had planned for this Thursday, 16^th April 2009, please clear your diary. We have a date! Let’s join the march to demand our constitutional right – free primary education – from the Tinkhundla Ministry of Education, which has inexplicably continued to withhold it in violation of both the constitution and a court order. We owe it to the orphaned children, destitute widows, these and all those who make up the 70% who subsist on less than $1/day, the 42% unemployed, and the around 40% directly ravaged by the AIDS pandemic.

Let me give you a bit more background. According to official projections, it will cost government some E225m (equivalent to $25m) to provide free primary education. While government insists it does not have this kind of money, King Mswati III’s personal wealth is estimated to be around $200m. To prove just how loaded he and his unconstitutional government are, Mswati will throw a multimillion Emalangeni birthday bash later this April.

As you read this, my younger brother lies in the casualty ward of the decrepit Mbabane Government Hospital with bullet fragments lodged in his eye area, fighting for more than just his life. This is because in the morning of Wednesday, 8^th April 2009, a gunman entered his grocery shop in my rural hometown, Lavumisa, in the south of Swaziland, and drilled three bullets to his head, and one each to both his arms, breaking the left one. He’s lucky to be alive because the head shots miraculously diverted from penetrating his brains, but still caused extensive damage to his eyes. In short, a scan to be administered (probably) this Tuesday (today), i.e., if he gets that lucky, will determine if he will ever regain any of his sight. The prospects are extremely poor. The suspect is still at large and, if the attitude of the Lavumisa police is anything to go by, there will be no arrest at all. My brother is a breadwinner for his wife and five children.

A number of things quickly become evident. First, if my brother were a member of the royal family, he would not have fallen victim to freak thugs like the ‘hit man’ in question. The reason is that we pay the security forces with our hard-earned taxes to protect the ruling class; to hell with the lives of those like my brother who toil everyday to make their luxury possible. The police had been pre-warned about the impending attack following a number of unsuccessful earlier ones. The police were too busy doing God-knows-whatever-else to respond. My brother would have bled to death had a sympathetic local mini-bus operator not abandoned his commuters and used the bus to take the barely conscious man to the nearest clinic, a good 7 km away, where first-aid was eventually administered before he was transferred on a 140 km stretch of road to the country’s biggest referral hospital, Mbabane, itself a mere death-trap due to crumbling infrastructure, understaffing, chronic drug shortages, lack of equipment, poor administration, theft, etc. Once again, the police did not pitch. When they were called, all they wanted to know was whether the gun shot “victim had died”, in an all too familiar laidback manner. When they finally showed up, he was already in hospital.

Second, you and I have no decent healthcare. The reason is that the ruling class and its government officials use our taxes to fly out to access state-of-the-art healthcare in South Africa, Taiwan, etc., and why would they even bother improving local healthcare facilities? For them, there is no waiting for days/weeks before a scan is administered to determine life-threatening/changing injuries.

Third, I’m using this rather personal case not for political posturing or grandstanding. Some things are just too close and too sombre for that kind of game. I’m doing it to make you aware that this government will not deliver what is rightfully your entitlement without you joining those who can wait no more to demand it. I know that my brother’s children are lucky to still have a father in whatever physical condition. Many more have never been as lucky and their harrowing stories will never be told. For them, the only hope to get any schooling is if government is persuaded to immediately roll out free primary education. We may never give these children all that they are entitled to as human beings but which they are deprived of by a heartless regime. But we can certainly give them a fighting chance in life if we ensure that they receive at least some education. I know this because, if you were unaware already, I came from a similar background and made use of the available educational provision to go all the way to even earn an internationally recognized doctoral degree (PhD). Let’s do it for the sake of these children and our country’s future. Don’t just say you love Swaziland; show it!