Africa's king of misrule faces a revolt

Thousands of workers, supported by their employers, are expected to paralyse Swaziland tomorrow and Tuesday, demanding an end to power abuses by the African kingdom's regime in a move heralded as the most serious challenge to 400 years of royal rule.

Thousands of workers, supported by their employers, are expected to paralyse Swaziland tomorrow and Tuesday, demanding an end to power abuses by the African kingdom's regime in a move heralded as the most serious challenge to 400 years of royal rule.

The national strike in the tiny, landlocked Commonwealth country the size of Wales is being led by Jan Sithole. The 47-year-old former electrician and trade union leader is emerging, as is trade union leader Morgan Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe, as a likely future leader of his country.

Mr Sithole is tired of Swaziland's image as an enclave of regressive royal rituals in which King Mswati III and his coterie rule by decree over 1 million subjects in one of the world's last absolute monarchies.

Opposition parties have been banned for 27 years and the regime gave itself the right last week to imprison political enemies for two months without trial. "We have protested many times," said Mr Sithole. "But then the king was popular, and, at worst, people blamed his advisers. Now the king has gone too far. He has put fear into all levels of society and the economy is being crippled."

Things came to a head last month when the 32-year-old Sherborne-educated king used the army to evict an estimated 200 people and their chiefs from two ancestral areas and gave the land to a relative, Prince Maguga.

In a country where "tradition" and patronage have increasingly become the guiding political principles for keeping people down - please your chief and you will be safe - the king had at a stroke, upset the accepted order.

"Now all the chiefs are nervous, and their people, the rural folk generally so supportive of the king, think they could be the next to be moved," said Mr Sithole, fully aware of the irony that he and other pro-democrats opposed to anachronistic governance have suddenly found traditional leaders joining their side.

The strike action tomorrow marks the strongest signal so far to King Mswati, the Ngwenyama (lion) who rules with his mother, Ndlovukazi (the she-elephant), along with an appointed council and a parliament supposed to be answerable to 300 chiefs, that he must modernise into a more constitutional reign.

The king came to the throne in 1982 when he was 18. His father, Sobhuza II, ruled for 61 years, overseeing independence from Britain in 1968.

In Mswati's reign, the country's two neighbours, Mozambique and South Africa, have been transformed. Swaziland has regressed, losing the "apartheid dollar" from being a decadent playground for South African whites and income from being a sanctions-busting export point.

King Mswati's annual reed dance, at which he chooses a wife from a bunch of bare-breasted maidens, seemed a quaint nod to tradition. So, too, did the Ncwala, in which a black bull is pulled to the ground by young warriors, killed and sat on by the naked king to renew his virility. Swaziland was a country of "noble savages" whose economy, somehow, ticked along nicely.

But that is over now, and, to prove it, Mr Sithole, for the first time in the history of his Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions (SFTU), has the powerful bosses of the sugar, cotton and tourism industries on his side.

On Friday, the Federation of Swaziland Employers delivered a letter to the king and his government condemning policies which "affect the viability of our businesses to provide employment, pay taxes and earn foreign exchange".

In a clever ruse, given that political parties are banned, Mr Sithole long ago enlisted the support of the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation and took advantage of Swaziland's historical closeness to the United States. As a result, the US last month suspended the country from its "generalised system of preferences", under which reforming Third World countries are paid premiums for their exports.

"Our economy is subsidised by the American taxpayer," said Mr Sithole, general secretary of the SFTU. "If they stop buying, we will have trouble eating. Eighty-five per cent of everything consumed in Swaziland has to be bought from abroad," His supporters intend to blockade all the border posts on 29 and 30 November.

The US has given Swaziland until the end of this month to scrap draconian labour legislation and show some inkling of an intention to scrap the state of emergency imposed 27 years ago. But the signs are not promising. Last Sunday, opponents of the regime had to travel 200km to Nelspruit, South Africa, to hold a meeting because they had been barred from doing so at home.

They tried to deliver their letter last Tuesday, announcing this week's strikes to the Prime Minister and were stopped by police. The government reintroduced an order on Wednesday allowing it to hold opponents for 60 days without trial. The first arrest was on Friday when Mario Masuku, a democracy activist, was jailed. "We understand from lawyers with connections in the Attorney General's office that there is a list of 82 people to be arrested on Monday and Tuesday," said Mr Sithole, who is on the list. "Mario is a political prisoner. The system is wicked. It is a disgrace that we should be the last southern African country to democratise.

"People have more rights in Zimbabwe. At least there, Morgan Tsvangirai is allowed to run an opposition party."