Illustration description: An elevated royal throne stands alone at the center of a large circular platform above a map-like landscape. Small roads and buildings spread across the land below, making the throne appear dominant over the country beneath it.

From Friday, 24 to 26 April 2026, the last absolute monarch in sub-Saharan Africa,

King Mswati III

of

Eswatini

, celebrated 40 years on the throne. Millions of Emalangeni (the Swazi Lilangeni, SZL, pegged 1:1 to the South African rand, ZAR) were spent on the lavish party at the newly opened Ezulwini Palazzo Hotel (worth over

8 billion Rands

) that hosted singer

Davido

, with gifts worth millions presented to the monarch at Lozitha Palace by private companies, including state-owned enterprises. Presidents of South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia joined the celebrations with other dignitaries, including the former presidents of South Africa, Jacob Zuma; Botswana, Ian Khama; and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kabila. The Taiwanese president,

William Lai

, who initially could not attend due to pressure from China, had to be flown in

secretly

on the monarch’s private jet at taxpayer expense. The state machinery has been working overtime to convince the nation, and the watching world, that there is something worth celebrating.

There have been genuine achievements over these four decades: modest infrastructure has expanded, bilateral relations with Taiwan have benefited from increased agricultural expertise, and pockets of the economy have grown. These are real achievements that shouldn’t be overlooked. However, an honest accounting of the forty-year reign ought to look beyond the ceremonial and ask serious questions about governance, including whether ordinary citizens are better off, freer, healthier, more educated, or more secure than they were in 1986, when the monarch took office at 18. If, on almost every meaningful measure, the answer is troubling, then what follows should not be seen as an attack on the monarch but rather as an indictment of a system of governance that has consistently chosen power over people.

An economy that works for the few

Eswatini’s economy tells a tale of two worlds, depending on who narrates it. At the very top, a narrow elite of businesspeople and politicians within the monarch’s inner circle controls most of the country’s wealth, while at the bottom, over 60% of the population lives below the poverty line. These are not the natural outcomes of a small, landlocked country with limited resources; they are the predictable results of a deliberate policy environment that has persisted for the past four decades.

Chief among these policy decisions is the treatment of

Tibiyo Taka Ngwane

, a sovereign wealth fund established in 1968 by the former monarch,

King Sobhuza II

. In its founding vision, the fund was intended to hold shares in the country’s major industries in trust for the Swazi nation, forming a genuine social security architecture built on the country’s productive assets. Four decades later, that vision has been quietly hollowed out. The fund operates without parliamentary scrutiny, pays no tax, and its benefits accrue not to the broad citizenry but to those at the very top of the political hierarchy. The late

Mario Masuku

, one of the country’s most enduring advocates for democracy, once

described

it as a “feedlot for the king and his inner circle.” What could have been the foundation of a genuine social safety net, shielding ordinary Swazis from poverty and unemployment, instead became a vehicle for elite accumulation.

This pattern of monopolisation extends across the economy, with major industries such as sugarcane farming, construction, media, and telecommunications dominated by entities closely tied to the ruling elite and their cronies. In the Lubombo region – the heart of Eswatini’s sugar belt and one of the country’s most significant sources of export revenue – this dynamic is most stark. Sugarcane has long been described as ‘Swazi gold’, yet the benefits of this gold

elude the small-scale farmers

who live and work the land surrounding the big corporations in the region.

The

dual land tenure system,

inherited from colonialism and never meaningfully reformed, divides the country between commercially productive Title Deed Land (TDL), where large-scale sugarcane, citrus and timber operations flourish, and the Swazi Nation Land (SNL), where the majority of …