CPS NEW YEAR MESSAGE 2018
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Communist Party of Swaziland New Year Message 2018:
Real Democracy Not Mswati’s Bogus Ballot!
01 January 2018
The Communist Party of Swaziland wishes all our compatriots and supporters a happy New Year for 2018, filled with progress towards people’s power and freedom for our country.
Hope is always an insubstantial thing when not rooted in concrete progress and the realizable expectations that it produces. And communists above all should avoid giving our people false hopes of change. But this year we have a number of channels through which to push forward our struggle to end the ruinous dictatorship of the absolute monarchy and make some substantive progress towards freedom.
The Tinkhundla elections, by which Mswati aims to further entrench his absolute power and control over the Swazi state, principally as a means of looting it, offer a chance to present clear demands for true democracy, the unbanning of political parties and movements, and for unrestricted freedom of assembly and expression.
These freedoms are the most basic requirements for any modern state and as such are widely supported by most countries of the world. But they are absent in Swaziland and demands for them are met with fierce repression. Mswati is cynically touting his elections as an exercise in democracy, though they have nothing to do with democracy. He is once again counting on hoodwinking the anyway toothless Southern Africa Development Community and African Union so that they rubber stamp the elections as free and fair.
The CPS will do its utmost to expose and disrupt the sham elections and to champion the demand for Real Democracy Not Mswati’s Bogus Ballot! We will make this slogan visible and understood the length and breadth of Swaziland, as well as among the Swazi diaspora further afield.
The CPS is calling on all freedom activists, whether in trade unions, the students’ movement, community organisations, and progressive NGOs to work to expose and disrupt Mswati’s elections. Expose them as a fake, and disrupt them in all possible ways – the means of which are for us to know and Mswati to find out!
During 2018, the CPS will be particularly focussed on generating stronger support for the trade union movement in Swaziland, and particularly the Trade Union Congress of Swaziland. This too must be done both within the country but also outside. We need to strengthen workers’ struggles for better pay and conditions, but also to stimulate greater class-consciousness among workers, so that immediate labour struggles are more firmly and productively linked to the wider ones for freedom and democracy in general and for exposing and disrupting Mswati’s elections in particular.
Beyond our immediate national context, the CPS also sees the change of leadership in the African National Congress, and the pledge by that great party and movement to reorient its work, as a chance to better engage with the ANC and the SA government on the need for our neighbour to put the Mswati regime under pressure to submit to democratic imperatives.
Though we as Swazis cannot rely on outside forces to bring about our liberation, we do need to halt all forms of outside support for Mswati – and it is no secret that in recent years SA – and by extension to some degree SADC – policy towards Mswati has been compromised by influential backward tendencies.
The CPS also views the dynamic objectives of the South African Communist Party to work for a reconfigured Alliance to take forward the National Democratic Revolution as opening up welcome possibilities for a more robust and overt pro-communist policy of solidarity with the Swazi freedom struggle. This would be a valuable step forward in avoiding the pitfalls and traps of factionalism and sectarianism that unfortunately still characterise some elements of the Swazi pro-democracy movement.
So, let’s make 2018 a year of change and progress in the struggle to end dictatorship and exploitation in our country. There is no earthly reason why the wealth and resources of our country should not be used to create a good life for all our people, to end poverty and the disease pandemics that blight our lives; to build homes, services, and provide quality free education from pre-school to university; to enable every citizen to realise his and her dreams and abilities. All we have to do is get rid of a corrupt and rotten dictatorship that has no means of support other than the oppression it imposes on our people! We must now redouble our efforts to achieve this aim.
ENDS
Contact
Njabulo Dlamini
International Organiser
Mobile: +268 7603 9844
Kenneth Kunene
General Secretary
Mobile: +266 5398 7993 / +27 72 594 3971
Email: in...@cpswaziland.org or cpsw...@gmail.com
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