Communist Party of Swaziland

Saturday 1 January 2022:- The Communist Party of Swaziland wishes all our compatriots a happy New Year at this time of more intense struggle for freedom in our country.

Let us make 2022 the year that tipped the scales in favour of people’s power. We must organise to spread the message throughout our country about what democracy means. This must be a time of protest, education, and action.

The time of absolute monarchy, of terrorising the people through feudal-capitalist patriarchy, must end. We need to turn up the heat for freedom, for Democracy Now!

And we need to highlight the role of the Communist Party of Swaziland in showing what kind of change we need.

The Party is the only force for change in Swaziland that has tabled practical and feasible ideas for ending the tyranny of dictatorship and moving towards a new order of democracy and freedom.

The Party has constantly stood on the popular view of the masses, calling for total change. On the other hand, some of the forces within the progressive camp have taken an elitist approach to struggle and in the process denigrated and sidelined the people’s popular view.

This elitist view manifests itself in the attempts to preserve, by manipulation of the masses, the monarchy and save it from accountability, among others.

Consequently, some of the elitist forces within the progressive camp have attempted to suppress the Communist Party and subject it to bitter attacks.

And yet the Communist Party of Swaziland has consistently, for the past decade, been the only political formation in Swaziland to paint a vision of the kind of Swaziland we need for our people to live in peace, freedom and prosperity.

This year, 2022, we must take our message and our identity as communists to all our compatriots. We must show that a Communist Party with a vision for a socialist order to replace the rotten feudal-capitalist order is the only viable and sustainable way ahead for our country.

Now, as the monarchy teeters in the face of growing protests for freedom, we are seeing all sorts of opportunistic elements attempting to climb aboard the sinking ship to take over the helm and create a situation of business-as-usual with a little more democratic window-dressing.

As CPS, we say: Beware of false promises for a bogus freedom. Only free and fair elections on a full franchise for radical structures combining direct and representative democracy will enable the people to create a progressive mandate for true freedom.

To the outside world, the AU and SADC, we say: Get real about what is happening in our country – the lack of actual rights, the corruption and draining of our wealth by the monarchy and the elite, the enforced impoverishment and low life expectancy, the bitter experience of hunger and the lack of a future in a country that is classified as middle-income.

We call on these structures, as well as the individual countries of the Southern African region to stop sucking up to Mswati and to start demanding real change:

• the unbanning of political parties,

• the release of all political prisoners and detainees,

• freedom of association, expression and media,

• the safe return of exiles,

• the creation of a representative interim governing platform that will arrange free and fair elections.

These are basic demands. They are demands not to realise some rosey far off future, but to change the present. The majority of our people have neither a present nor a future under the current regime and feudal-capitalist system.

We must change the present in order to have any kind of worthwhile future. And that starts with ending the present system of injustice and exploitation.

And so, we say let us make this year a year of change, a year where the present changes and the future start to look worthwhile and real.