I may not be qualified to state such but being a
bonafide Swazi interested in seeing the country progressing than
being privatized to selfish business people who are only concerned about making
money than empowering fellow Swazis.
I have noted that a number of government organs in the country have been
privatized and some are still in the process of going through such a phase. It
is no hidden fact that some parastatals like CTA have been a financial drain to
government to such an extent that Government is dreaming of reducing the CTA’s
looting hole through privatization.
Even though the country is engulfed with huge financial crushes one should
know that , asking too much might lead to the government being forced to
privates most services in order to benefit tinini
According to my untrained eye government is not in the business of creating
demand but it provides services for its society to function happily and by
privatizing most of the services it will mean that a lot of fly-by –night
businesses would emerge and create new demands for new products. We know that
our local government picks up thrash , while the national government services
ensures that it teaches our children through OVC fund then I smell a rat when
in the end of the day government privatizes its essential services then these
‘rich’ businesses will pick more thrash and make a lot of money at government’s
expense.
I don’t care what other people would say but the Swazi government is
directly accountable to me and you . Even next year the country will hold its
elections and we (Swazis ) eligible to vote. On the other side of the private
sector the corporate CEO Is controlled by a small group of people known as the
board of directors while we (Swazis)
wish to fire our Members of Parliament, all we
have to do is show up at the polls (something Swazis in the Urban areas are
notoriously bad at).
I have just read from some useful publication that
Ian Smith, Prime Minister of Rhodesia
(Now Zimbabwe) 1964-1979, often said: "we were never beaten by our enemies
- we were betrayed by our friends". The West essentially promised white
leaders in South Africa that
they would be allowed to continue practicing apartheid if they would stop
arming Rhodesia
in her war against communism. Between 1979 and 1980, Rhodesia
fell into Marxist dictatorship under Mugabe and had its name changed to Zimbabwe
. The World Bank provided loans to Mugabe up
until May 2000. This is not an academic issue since millions face starvation
because of Mugabe's Marxist policy of seizing the nation's farms. Ominously,
Mugabe has turned to communist China
to run farms in Zimbabwe.
In the 1980s the world saw starving
children in Ethiopia,
but what they did not realize was that this was a planned famine. The Marxist
regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam undertook nationalization of agriculture and
massive population resettlement program modeled on Stalin and Mao's starvation
programmes in the 1930s and 40s which killed millions. Meanwhile the World Bank
continued to send Mengistu millions of dollars, much of it intended for the
ministry of agriculture undertaking the resettlement programme.
In country after country in Africa, there has been no accountability in the use of
World Bank loans... Billions in World Bank loans have been embezzled in Africa and rarely anyone is held accountable and
prosecuted.
It comes as no surprise then that by
its own admission, the World Bank's purported policy of strengthening African
free market economies by lending $50 billion for 'Structural Adjustment
programs' and other projects over the past thirty years has been an abject
failure. That's because their real purpose was the exact opposite:
The Bank's own reports in the 1980s
revealed that it played a major role in nationalizing the development process
throughout the Third World. Regarding these
harsh conditionalities imposed by the structural adjustment loans, a 1985
confidential bank report by leading development experts concluded that 'the
SAL's seemingly hard and all-encompassing conditionality is largely illusory'.
The bank and some proponents of foreign aid claim that a wave of privatization
swept the Third World but actually
'privatization was almost all talk'. World Bank loans either go directly to the
recipient government or must be guaranteed by the government. So, by inevitably
increasing the politicization of Third World
economies, World Bank aid was the economic tranquilizer dart which created a
weaker domestic market for the foreign multinationals to feed on. I
remember two years ago , when I just ignorant of the world’s political
situations but after intense reading I concluded that by end of the 1980s that
by end of the 1980s the
banks had successfully empowered and corrupted Third World
governments with billions in bank loans. Liberal democracy and the free market
had been strangled. Now for the second play: The sell off. The directive for
the sell off came from the World Bank and IMF at the end of the 1980s as shown
by World Bank documents signed by James Wolfensen and leaked to a BBC
investigative journalist, Greg Palast. The World Bank flew in their teams who
dictated their plans, an average of 111 conditions in a pre-written document,
to each nation's finance minister. If he refused he would be denied any further
loans and the life blood which had sustained his government would be cut. These
conditions included selling off the natural resources and national industries
to foreign multinationals. In the case of Argentina, they required the nation
to give up its gas water and oil to Vivendi, Repsol, Enron and a few other
multinationals. In 1988 Jeb Bush made a call to an Argentine senator asking him
to sell a gas pipeline to Enron at one fifth of its market value. In return, a
percentage of the discount would be deposited in the senator's Swiss bank
account. The process has been called 'briberization' rather than privatization. 
When making the case for such a grand
conspiracy as this, it is helpful to call a whistleblower to the witness stand.
Published in November 2004, the book entitled Confessions of an
Economic Hit Man by John Perkins ( now a New York Times best seller)
is a public confession by an insider about the real purpose of Western loans to
developing countries. Working in a private consulting firm, Perkins was one of
the 'economic hit men' who carried out the plan detailed in the World Bank
documents. Perkins describes a classical conspiracy between government and big
business. The U.S. National Security Agency recruited and trained the 'economic
hit men' to carry out their duties through private consulting firms and other
corporations. The beneficiaries of the conspiracy were the international
bankers and shareholders in the multi-national corporations. Unable to repay
the loans organized by the hit men, developing countries had to surrender their
national resources to their Western creditors.
What an extraordinary scam: Destroy a
country's domestic capitalism and free-markets, get it into massive debt and
then with financial gun to its head, shake it down for everything its got. It
is even more extraordinary for the fact that, because this piracy is conducted
in international waters, it isn't even illegal! One of the questions raised in
the next chapter is whether or not these agents have been acting, to some
degree, on Her Majesty's (secret) service.