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Due to the current drought affecting the Southern African region, food prices have escalated in Swaziland. The country’s staple food, maize meal, in particular has seen a 66% price hike since the beginning of the year.

Faced with this challenge, and a non-responsive government, the local population has discovered what many Swazis who live close to the country’s borders have known for a long time; that it is much cheaper to purchase mealie-meal from South Africa. Being such a tiny land-clocked country, Swaziland enables even the most centrally located of its citizens to get to a border post for as little as R30 using public transport.

Thus a return trip from Manzini to Oshoek border, to purchase a 50kg bag of mealie-meal at a price of R280 is cheaper than buying it from a shop in Manzini by a whooping R250, according to prices given by the country’s members of parliament. That is scandalous.

Recognizing the potential haemorrhage of customers to shops along the border, the country’s agricultural controlling authority, NAMBoard, immediately banned all purchasing of mealie-meal from South Africa. According to them, the practice has always been illegal; the only change is that they are now enforcing it. This is ironic because this is the worst time to enforce such an unjust law.

At a time when the Swazi government should be relaxing all laws that worsen the economic impact of drought on local house-holds, instead it has moved to “protect the economy” by forcing all locals to buy the ridiculously priced local mealie-meal. In other words, the Swazi government, through NAMBoard, expects only the local consumers to be affected by the current drought conditions, while local milling companies are supposed to continue making profits as usual. If anyone ever needed an illustration of the effects of a dictatorship on the livelihood of its citizens, this is probably the clearest.

Issued by the Swaziland Solidarity Network